Here is the craziest part of the TFA experience. Every time you think that you have experienced the hardest thing you can experience, it turns out that you ain’t seen nothing yet. I am writing this on another Megabus trek to Chicago, listening to my Institute playlist. Institute was SO hard (sorry 2012s, when…
read more »About 98% of the time, this blog is about me. My struggles, my moments of clarity, my hilarious and often ridiculous inner monologue. And this is good, because in the past 6 weeks during which I have clawed my way out of Deep Dark Depression (a word that I do not use lightly), I have…
read more »Doc… Teaching as Leadership right? If Doc applied to TFA he’d be all up on that TAL rubric. Grumpy… Sometimes after I have said, “Please go to the cafeteria, please go to the gym, please get in line for breakfast, please take a seat, please don’t throw that milk carton,” for the 23,000,000th time in…
read more »Confession: I wrote this post on Thursday, from my classroom. There’s something a little wasteful and opulent about writing while I’m at school, but sometimes I figure that if I’m going to teach it, I have to practice it. Also, I magically finished next week’s lesson plans that morning, including worksheets. Also, I had nothing to…
read more »February 14th seems like a strange day to be looking back on the last year. It’s not New Years, it’s not a birthday, and it’s not any other yearly marker of time’s passage. It is the anniversary of something bad happening to some Catholic saint somewhere for some reason, but we won’t go into that.…
read more »When I first started working at my school, t-minus 7 months ago, I was literally told almost immediately about my district’s love of snow days. “We get off for everything!” they gleefully told me, “Even the tiniest flurries!” Naturally, this has resulted in me waking up whenever there is the slightest hint of a chance of snow…
read more »Ok look, here is what they’ll never tell you about being a teacher as a tender young TFA recruit. Oh they’ll tell you that it’s rewarding (read: hard). They’ll tell you that it’s exhausting, even. But they won’t tell you about Sunday nights. Sunday night is Pure Evil. Never mind the soul deadening anxiety about…
read more »I try very very hard to be very very honest on this blog. That sounds like an easy thing to do, especially since I’m a sixth grade teacher who spends her life trying to separate strands of truth and fiction from children who insist that they need to go to the bathroom/counselor/nurse/principal/other teacher RIGHT NOW…
read more »The St Louis Making the Grade series has undergone a brief hiatus (read: 8 months), but I am ready to resurrect it, in part because I have a number of places which are itching to be reviewed. Today’s establishments are a pair of Mexican restaurants which count themselves amongst some of TFA corps members’ preferred list. Here…
read more »Today, over 65 volunteers gathered for three hours of service at Roosevelt High School. Several teachers and students came to represent the school but the majority of the crowd was comprised of citizens from the surrounding neighborhoods of Shaw and Tower Grove(s) East and South. The law firm of Bryan Cave LLC and the TALX…
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