Last night some friends from Michigan stopped by Memphis to meet us for dinner on their way to Texas. Aiming for some level of Memphian authenticity without having to battle crowds, we met them at Soul Fish Cafe, on the outskirts of Midtown (which is sort of like Eastown, if you're from Grand Rapids), just into Cooper-Young. Afterwards we walked around the block to get milkshakes at Java Cabana.
Driving on the highway on the way back, top down, I had a chance to look around more. There was the great dark sky above me. Trees popping up in clumps. (There are these amazing trees everywhere still flowering in the middle of July, with little white and pink blossoms.) City lights twinkling around. I stuck my hands up (David was driving, not me, in case anyone got worried), and my palms were getting buffeted by the wind in a way that was half attack and half hug. Bugs were chirping. Something was playing loudly on the radio.
All I could think was, "In this moment, I swear, we are infinite" (Chbosky). (If you don't know what I am talking about or just want to relive the rush again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlWpupgrTCQ - the quote is also in the book - this is one case where I think the book and movie are both spectacular and complement each other nicely.)
It was one of those moments where everything sparkles and you're completely enthralled just to be alive. Which made me realize how negative I've been.
"Why can't we find anywhere to recycle cardboard?"
"It's always so hot in our apartment!"
"I wish I could walk to a cute little coffee shop. Or anywhere, really."
That last complaint had been simmering for a while, but it recently came out in a Skype conversation with my sister, who lives in Oregon City. She was complaining that although there were 2 coffee shops she could walk to, one of them had no atmosphere but good coffee, and one had great atmosphere, but terrible coffee.
I laughed. If I walked 30 minutes (through the heat), I could get to a Chick-fil-A or iHop.
But you know what? We chose to do that. We could have lived in the cute little areas. And we chose to live here. So now I need to own it and stop complaining.
My flash of infinity opened me to the positive, which made me realize how negative I've been, so here are 10 reasons I love Memphis:
1. Flowers in July
2. I feel like it's really summer. Yes, you sweat by just existing, but that's how it's supposed to be. And there are sounds of bugs all around you. It's like...I'm home again. There are dead semi/cicadas on the ground. That's what summer is.
3. All the sides that come with breakfast - for instance, at Blue Plate Cafe, if you order an omelette, it comes with 2 biscuits and gravy and your choice of grits or 3 pancakes or hash browns.
4. Donuts at church every week
5. Sandwich brigade at church (once a month during Sunday school hour we make sandwiches for people who are homeless - we made 800 yesterday)
6. Laundry in our apartment (as opposed to the basement, at college)
7. Our mini garden (Bruce the spruce, Paulo the cilantro, Angel the oregano, Mei-chan the basil, Archie the parsley, and Plato the sago palm)
8. I will not have to trudge through snow to scrape our bug, Jeeves, in February. (I try to remember this when the black leather seat is burning my thighs.)
9. The roads all have such darling names, like Birch Run Lane, Frosty Meadow Drive, and Autumn Springs Cove.
10. Every apartment complex (at least that we looked into) has a pool. Maybe once it cools down a little, we'll try ours out.
Peace,
Anneke
Monday, July 20, 2015
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Scoreboards and Shower Curtains
Hello!
This is David writing on here for the first time! So you can probably expect a less intellectually stimulating post, and more of just relaying some stuff that’s happened, but we all need a break sometimes.
It’s funny how something that seems to be such a negative experience in the moment can be looked back on fondly only after it’s finished. We finished teaching summer school on Wednesday, so now at the end of it all, you finally get to hear about my experiences.
My summer school
experience was rather different from Anneke’s. At the school where I was
teaching, all students were there for credit recovery—meaning that they were
taking classes that they failed during the school year in order to move on to
the next grade. So, you take 14 ninth graders (hopefully going into tenth) who
failed classes (so many of them already face a great amount of disengagement
from school), put them all together in a room in the summer when they’d rather
be out with their friends or at a job making money, and you can imagine trying
to get them invested in physical science is difficult. Very difficult. More so
toward the beginning, I’d get back from school having taught only one 90-minute
class and I’d be exhausted or sad or angry or all of the above. It was nothing
like my student teaching experience. In college I had learned overarching
philosophies of classroom management. It turns out that didn’t entirely prepare
me for a difficult classroom to manage. Thinking that I should be more prepared
to teach than my colleagues who had not studied education and obtained teacher
certification like I had did not improve my confidence. Less than a week in, I
went to my teaching coach and said something along the lines of, “I’m failing
miserably and I don’t know what to do.”
So, he told me
something I already knew, but probably needed him to tell me in order for me to
really get it together and do it: I needed to focus less on all these
strategies TFA had given for management and more on relationships. Things did
get better. It takes time. For things to actually get good, I needed more time.
I’m going to stop there with the struggles and move onto a few highlights of summer school!
I’m going to stop there with the struggles and move onto a few highlights of summer school!
1. There was the
student who put her head down in every class until I told her that she could
write a scientific explanation as a rap and even perform it at the end of class
that day. She worked furiously for the rest of class.
2. There was the
student who started out not doing her work, and never contributing in class
(she wouldn’t even respond when I’d ask her a question one-on-one). We had
daily “exit tickets” (4-5 questions students had to answer at then end of
class, like a short quiz) and the first few she failed terribly. It definitely
wasn’t that she wasn’t smart—she was just very very quiet and would silently
struggle and fail (something that can be hard to catch when you’re dealing with
the more visible disruptions to learning in the classroom). It probably didn't
help that, as I would discover later, other students picked on her. So every day
I’d talk to her, and every day I’d tell her I knew she could do it and that I
was there to help her. Our relationship grew, and by the end of the summer, she
realized that I was a safe person, and my classroom was a safe place, and she
not only raised her hand to ask for help in class, she even started
contributing in front of the whole class! She passed with flying colors (100%
on the final test), and hopefully obtained some new confidence along the way.
3. There was the
student who was probably the most difficult to deal with. No matter how many
times I had to tell him to have a seat, to not leave the classroom in the
middle of class, to stop snooping in the closet or drawers of the desk up
front, and no matter how many times he responded with “get out of my face”, I
never gave up on him. As often as I could, I would sit down and work with him
one-on-one. By the end of the summer, he was still all over the place in class,
but I’d have him smiling and high-fiving me when he got something when it was
just us working together. He’d still say, “get out of my face”, but I think he
knew I was on his side.
4. There was the
student who on the last day came up to me and said, “You know, I think I’m
actually going to miss you.”
5. Every single
one of my students passed my class and the other two classes they took at
summer school! And I could actually write a highlight about all 14 of them (but
we’ll stick with four for now).
6. Summer school
ended with a staff vs. student basketball game. After talking up my abilities
all summer, my students were a little disappointed with how much I was
exaggerating (students were the visitors, in case you couldn’t guess).
So yes, summer
school was hard, and yes I am glad it's over. I was sad to leave my students
though.
Summer school is
over, and now we’re looking forward to the coming school year. Sounds like I
might be teaching physics and chemistry now, but I still don’t even know that
for sure…
In other news,
Anneke and I have moved into our new apartment! We still await a good amount of
our stuff that has been in storage for the summer, but it’s starting to feel
like a home. And it can’t be a home without a periodic table shower curtain.
Friday, July 3, 2015
Reevaluation
"You need to reevaluate your driving skills."
It was while pulling out onto the road that I realized I didn't know how to get back to the University of Memphis. We had been going from store to store, stocking up to outfit our upcoming apartment, so just reversing our path (which I had forgotten anyways) wasn't going to do the trick.
I asked David to put it in the GPS, and meanwhile attempted to make something up. I pulled up to the stop sign, turned on my left blinker, and waited for the cars already stopped the other directions to go. When they cleared, I pulled out into the intersection and began to turn. That was when I realized that the two cars coming into my lane weren't stopping. Apparently it was a three-way stop, not a four-way one. I waited in the left turn lane, then sidled right into the lane and pulled towards to the next stop sign. Still in the far left lane.
About twenty feet out, David announced that I should be turning right. I made a quick dash across two lanes and stopped in the right turn lane, waiting for the other cars (for this actually was a four-way stop) to go ahead. The man in the car on my left rolled down his window. It was a plain car, but he was in a police uniform.
"You need to reevaluate your driving skills."
This post is not actually about my possibly poor driving skills (I would like to term them more "poor sign reading skills," although I admit those are critical to driving). It's also not a rant about the speed of GPS warnings. Or my lack of direction.
The line seemed to me like it should come out of a movie, and then I should have some life epiphany, because I realize that I need not only reevaluate my driving skills, but also my entire life.
I almost wanted to take it that way. I want my life to be more like a story, and I was in a slightly bad mood, complaining about long hours, difficult students, and impossible restrictions and expectations.
"But," I thought, "I don't want to reevaluate everything. I still know I'm supposed to be here, doing this. I just need to be better at it."
David and I have been watching West Wing together, and tonight we watched the finale of season 2. And as the characters dealt with degenerative disease, an embassy under assault, a tropical storm, a friend killed by a drunk driver, and life constantly under watch, all the while making giant decisions, I thought, "Who am I to complain?"
Then I finished the last 30 pages of Between Shades of Gray, by Ruta Sepetys. Between Shades of Gray is a novel of historical fiction, about a girl and her family who were deported from Lithuania to Siberia during WW2. And as I read about frostbite, starvation, drafty mud huts, scurvy, and death, I thought, "Who am I to complain?"
Those last pages left me with a few thoughts:
"We'd been trying to touch the sky from the bottom of the ocean. I realized that if we boosted one another, maybe we'd get a little closer" (307). First of all, that is just a beautiful metaphor. Let's take a moment to appreciate that. Secondly, "Who am I to complain?" - at least I'm standing on dry ground. And lastly, boy, isn't that true. What are we doing? But, how can we do it better?
"From my rotting body flowers shall grow, and I am in them and that is eternity." - Munch As a Christian, that is not where I claim eternity comes from. And yet, I think it carries some truth. The circle of life is beautiful, but this can also be metaphorical, in the love we leave with others. I don't want to say your life is worth only what you pass on to others, but I believe this is critical in a way we often overlook. Isn't there some reflection of Jesus in that?
"Maybe you don't really want to die.... Maybe you just think you deserve to." This is said to a man who has spent the entire time griping about how he wants to die, yet never doing anything about it (after the first night, when he jumped out of the truck). 1) It's very true that some people feel like this, and I need to get better at helping teenagers with no self esteem (I'm not sure how much my pep talks do after fourteen years of learning otherwise), and 2) I think this sentiment is true of humans in other contexts, too. Sometimes almost in the opposite way, as in "Maybe you don't actually want to do that, you just want to want to do it." The relationship between action and belief is a funny one.
"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." - Camus Not much to add here, except to get over myself, again. And get back to it. (Although perhaps, again, we could all stop to appreciate the beautiful phrasing.)
I also finished The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, this week. I read it in preparation for teaching it to 10th graders, although I would recommend it to everyone. It makes poverty up close and personal and delves deeply into family and love in a very hands-off way. However, if that's your only look at poverty, make sure you read up on systemic oppression and poverty as well. That's my one concern with teaching the book, so I'll be sure to include some articles in the unit, too.
I go back and forth about the Fourth of July. I'm not sure how to feel about it. Mostly I just remember my great aunt and her cakes, and I make a cake in memory of her. Mostly I just like a reason to celebrate with my family. Although as David and I are in Memphis this year, that's not happening as much. So that all complicates it more.
My love to everyone,
Anneke
It was while pulling out onto the road that I realized I didn't know how to get back to the University of Memphis. We had been going from store to store, stocking up to outfit our upcoming apartment, so just reversing our path (which I had forgotten anyways) wasn't going to do the trick.
I asked David to put it in the GPS, and meanwhile attempted to make something up. I pulled up to the stop sign, turned on my left blinker, and waited for the cars already stopped the other directions to go. When they cleared, I pulled out into the intersection and began to turn. That was when I realized that the two cars coming into my lane weren't stopping. Apparently it was a three-way stop, not a four-way one. I waited in the left turn lane, then sidled right into the lane and pulled towards to the next stop sign. Still in the far left lane.
About twenty feet out, David announced that I should be turning right. I made a quick dash across two lanes and stopped in the right turn lane, waiting for the other cars (for this actually was a four-way stop) to go ahead. The man in the car on my left rolled down his window. It was a plain car, but he was in a police uniform.
"You need to reevaluate your driving skills."
This post is not actually about my possibly poor driving skills (I would like to term them more "poor sign reading skills," although I admit those are critical to driving). It's also not a rant about the speed of GPS warnings. Or my lack of direction.
The line seemed to me like it should come out of a movie, and then I should have some life epiphany, because I realize that I need not only reevaluate my driving skills, but also my entire life.
I almost wanted to take it that way. I want my life to be more like a story, and I was in a slightly bad mood, complaining about long hours, difficult students, and impossible restrictions and expectations.
"But," I thought, "I don't want to reevaluate everything. I still know I'm supposed to be here, doing this. I just need to be better at it."
David and I have been watching West Wing together, and tonight we watched the finale of season 2. And as the characters dealt with degenerative disease, an embassy under assault, a tropical storm, a friend killed by a drunk driver, and life constantly under watch, all the while making giant decisions, I thought, "Who am I to complain?"
Then I finished the last 30 pages of Between Shades of Gray, by Ruta Sepetys. Between Shades of Gray is a novel of historical fiction, about a girl and her family who were deported from Lithuania to Siberia during WW2. And as I read about frostbite, starvation, drafty mud huts, scurvy, and death, I thought, "Who am I to complain?"
Those last pages left me with a few thoughts:
"We'd been trying to touch the sky from the bottom of the ocean. I realized that if we boosted one another, maybe we'd get a little closer" (307). First of all, that is just a beautiful metaphor. Let's take a moment to appreciate that. Secondly, "Who am I to complain?" - at least I'm standing on dry ground. And lastly, boy, isn't that true. What are we doing? But, how can we do it better?
"From my rotting body flowers shall grow, and I am in them and that is eternity." - Munch As a Christian, that is not where I claim eternity comes from. And yet, I think it carries some truth. The circle of life is beautiful, but this can also be metaphorical, in the love we leave with others. I don't want to say your life is worth only what you pass on to others, but I believe this is critical in a way we often overlook. Isn't there some reflection of Jesus in that?
"Maybe you don't really want to die.... Maybe you just think you deserve to." This is said to a man who has spent the entire time griping about how he wants to die, yet never doing anything about it (after the first night, when he jumped out of the truck). 1) It's very true that some people feel like this, and I need to get better at helping teenagers with no self esteem (I'm not sure how much my pep talks do after fourteen years of learning otherwise), and 2) I think this sentiment is true of humans in other contexts, too. Sometimes almost in the opposite way, as in "Maybe you don't actually want to do that, you just want to want to do it." The relationship between action and belief is a funny one.
"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." - Camus Not much to add here, except to get over myself, again. And get back to it. (Although perhaps, again, we could all stop to appreciate the beautiful phrasing.)
I also finished The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, this week. I read it in preparation for teaching it to 10th graders, although I would recommend it to everyone. It makes poverty up close and personal and delves deeply into family and love in a very hands-off way. However, if that's your only look at poverty, make sure you read up on systemic oppression and poverty as well. That's my one concern with teaching the book, so I'll be sure to include some articles in the unit, too.
I go back and forth about the Fourth of July. I'm not sure how to feel about it. Mostly I just remember my great aunt and her cakes, and I make a cake in memory of her. Mostly I just like a reason to celebrate with my family. Although as David and I are in Memphis this year, that's not happening as much. So that all complicates it more.
My love to everyone,
Anneke
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