It’s an unfortunately familiar scene in my classroom – one of my students raising their hand, fist balled, ready to land a punch in a dispute over a cup of crayons or the last available tricycle.  When you’re caught in a classroom that bounces back and forth between two distinct languages and it’s your first…

Where have I been? Nowhere new.  I have so many mini stories, heartbreaking stories, funny stories about the things kids say and the way they think and I honestly wish I had been keeping up with this blog so I could share them with all of you, instead of just my parents..though sometimes I’m pretty…

It’s amazing how a few (or, let’s be honest, a LOT) of frustrating times can completely blot over the high points of a week. In an attempt to wipe off the grime from the last part of 3rd quarter: -Possibly the best teaching adventure ever happened yesterday. I remembered at the last minute, while eating…

One of the best decisions I’ve made recently is to record myself reading a lot of the little easy readers for our listening center. After listening to the libritos so many times, the kids are way more apt to pick them up and start reading them by themselves…. and more apt to pick up other…

There is something inherently emasculating about revealing oneself as a preschool teacher in conversation with strangers.  It’s always an interesting social experiment, however, and I usually take one of three routes: simply state that I teach pre-K, go vague and say that I work with younger elementary students, or drop the TFA bomb and let…

After thinking that I might not post again this semester, here I am writing just a few days later. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I have learned from the TFA experience. It’s a question that is going to come up in job/school interviews and casual conversations for the next several years, I…

I’m a bit embarrassed that my last post was after the first week of school in August.  At the same time, here I am after the first week of school in January, and I could stop after this and feel content with the symmetry.  That’s not the plan, but it’s an option. To sum up…

At the beginning, middle, and end of each year, Teach For America sends a survey to its corps members and asks us to rate a number of areas with regard to our performance as teachers and the staff’s performance as guides to our professional development. While some of the questions change from survey to survey,…

I don’t update this blog often.  A recent post on here questioning the relative silence of the 2012 corps and suggesting perhaps there is a rather insidious explanation (such as widespread mental breakdown) for this silence inspired me to write on here.  I may be a 2011, not a 2012, but for posterity’s sake, I…

I’m from a small county in Virginia and that’s where I went for the holidays this year. Despite it’s size, it’s one of the wealthiest counties for it’s size in the nation and the public schools are amazing. I think I’ve mentioned before how lucky I am to have lived where I lived, and attended…