Possibility

One of my favorite things about being a teacher is that there is a clear starting point and ending point to each year: a time to set new goals, evaluate how you did, then try again. With my move to a new school, the opportunities seem endless. One of these opportunities is the possibility of coaching track.

Today I came across an article about Students Run L.A. (SRLA), a program in Los Angeles schools that works with middle and high school students to help them complete a marathon. The statistics for the program are amazing. In the L.A. Unified School District, 68 percent of incoming freshmen graduate from high school, compared to 90 percent of those who participate in SRLA. This statistic has been fairly consistent over the 17 years of the program. And this year, an astonishing 2,500 students ran in City of Los Angeles Marathon, 10% of the entire field.

The students that are participating are those that are often most "at risk." I think about my own students, and what a boost of self confidence and goal-setting skills completing a marathon would provide.

With my current spirit of anticipation for next year, each page of the article got my mind rolling faster and faster. I kept asking myself, "Why isn't there something like this in New York?" It didn't take much more reading to find the New York Road Runners Foundation. I'm a member of New York Road Runners and a teacher, yet I had never heard of their program to train kids to run a 10K without stopping.

Suddenly, my own love of running is heading in a new direction. And I'm more excited about that than I have been about anything in a long time.

Number 170

This is the 170th post on clean up on aisle life. Yet, I'm somehow not running out of things to say. My most recent problem is that due to unexplained intermittent internet access at home, my blogging style has been cramped to an unreal degree.

You may feel that you haven't missed out on anything because of this, but you'd be wrong. I didn't write about my feelings about a particular paragraph I read in The Tipping Point this week, or a funny phone call I received from the mother of one of my students, or my newfound love of the well-named country song "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy.)"

Fortunately, the wireless is working fine now, and I can tell you all about Adventure NYC, which took place in Central Park. Last year I went, and it was a small number of tents and booths in Union Square. It's grown quite a bit, coming complete with rock climbing walls, the flying trapeze, a children's section that was unbelievable, free nalgene bottles, a nice man who gave my roommate 12 sets of materials needed to build kaleidoscopes with her class next year, a contest entry for your dream trip (mine was for my mom and I to go to the Galapagos,) free copies of Backpacker and other magazines, fly fishing practice, bicycle test rides, free kayaking, endurance challenges, and more.

If you missed it this year, write in your calendar for next June to look it up. It's hard to find anything related to the outdoors in New York City, but the growth of this event makes me hope that interest in the outdoors is growing, even in this super-urban environment. Maybe I'm not as missplaced as I feel from time to time here.

Questions We Should All Ask Ourselves

June 28 is the last day of school, my mom's birthday, and the release date for a documentary we should all go see. Who Killed the Electric Car? has an excellent website packed with information that you should take some time out to read right now.

Believing

Yesterday I told my students I would not be returning to teach at our school next year. I told them I was very sad and that I would miss them. Two of my students were crying, three or four didn't seem to be taking in the conversation at all, and the remaining students were automatically angry. One student kept repeating, "I knew you were gonna say that, I knew it." They were all talking at the same time, throwing questions at me, repeating, "You mean you're never coming back?"

We were maybe five minutes into the conversation, and I was nervous because the tension in the room was getting to be too much. Then, one student asked, "Are you still teaching special ed?"

"Yes," I said, a little thrown off by the question. "I'll be teaching sixth grade at a school closer to home. The school is different, but my students will be a lot like you."

Suddenly, the room was calm. I was shocked by the change, and realized that only after hearing I was still teaching special ed could my students believe that I was not abandoning them, that they had not driven me away. And even though I was prepared to explain to them that I was not abandoning them, I had no idea what the key to making them believe that was. I've never been so thankful for a student's question before.

The Heart of the Game

Last night my roommate and I saw a sneak preview for the documentary The Heart of the Game. The tickets were free, so my expectations were not too high. I was in for a wonderful surprise.

Within five minutes, I was completely drawn in by the story about a girl's high school basketball team in Seattle. It was one of those rare movie experiences in which you feel bonded to everyone in the theater. There were several points in which the audience erupted in applause. It's been a long time since I've laughed this hard about a sport, and I know I wasn't the only one crying at a few points.

Ward Serrill, who wrote and produced the work, spent seven years following and filming this team. I have no idea what motivated him to start this particular story, but it's phenomenal. It is the kind of story that renews your faith in the human spirit.

Up for Interpretation

I awoke this morning from a dream about my brother's wedding, which was last weekend. But in the dream version, he and his wife were having a wedding with another couple on a stage in an auditorium. I was in my typical jeans and tank top, happily talking to the many people in the audience who I knew. Suddenly, there was music signaling the beginning of the wedding. I could see the bridesmaids stage right,and I was not even in my dress. In the excitement of everything, I had forgotten that I was a bridesmaid!

Before I could do anything, though, the bridesmaids for the other bride were taking the stage. They weren't wearing bridesmaids dresses. Instead, they were dressed in absurd costumes and had created a robotic choreographed entrance for themselves. The bride followed them, wearing a denim jumpsuit reminiscent of the 1970s and acting completely unbride-like.

It was at this point that I woke up. My first conscious thought was something along the lines of "What the hell..." Throughout my day, (reading, grocery shopping, catching up with my best friend from college, repeatedly checking the score of the Mets game, leaving the house to meet a friend for dinner,) my mind continues to return to the strange images from this unsettling dream. Like Scrooge, it's possible that something I ate last night from dinner is causing such dreams, but even Scrooge realized that wasn't the case. Where does this stuff come from?

Internet Tragedy (A Melodrama)

I still don't know what happened. One minute everything was normal, the next all of my internet settings were gone. Mozilla Firefox somehow is my new homepage and all, I repeat ALL, of my bookmarks are gone. It was just last week that I sat down and organized them into neat folders: categorizing my favorite websites into Teaching math, Teaching literacy, NYC to do list, Free things for teachers, Books to read, Travel, and more.

I've been pretending all day that this is no big deal. Now it is obvious to me that I may not be meant for the technological age. In the past month, all my favorite websites have been erased from my computer and I lost all the phone numbers stored in my phone. These two irreversible events would not have happened if I lived in a time in which it was common to write all this stuff down.

So please, if you're reading this, learn from my mistakes. Use those archaic tools of pen and paper to record this information. And if you have a website you feel I just can't live without, please let me know. My empty Bookmarks folder is depressing me.

Milestones and Mistakes

Today I spent some time in Central Park with two friends, one of which has a baby. While we were sitting on the blanket, participating in basic gossip and commenting on a group of the most amazing hula hoopers I've ever seen who were shaking their hips nearby, my friend's baby sucked his thumb for the first time. Last week, he discovered his feet, and now he spends much of his time grabbing on to them, which makes him look as though he is performing amazing yoga-esque feats.

I've never been much of a baby person. (This particular baby is actually the first baby I have ever liked, but he has opened the door for many more babies.) It is amazing how many little milestones there are in those first few months, and how exciting the achievement of these milestones are for the adults in that baby's life. I spent an inordinate amount of time exclaiming over his thumb-sucking, while his mom was calmly saying, "Now, I'm going to have to break him of that."

Later, his mom wanted to go shopping, so I told her that I would play with the baby while she tried on clothing. I sat down on a couch near the entrance of the store and cooed and kissed and made faces for quite a while. Three separate people came up and told me how beautiful my son was. (I only corrected two of them.) To me, this is a glaring mistake. How could anyone possibly believe that this child was actually mine? It's not that I'm not old enough, it's that I have no clue what I'm doing. But somehow, others look on and think it fits.

After several hours of baby-time while my friend took care of the many errands that can pile up on the single, working mother of a four-month-old, I got on the bus and made my way back home. I had a great time, but even with the thrice-made mistake, motherhood is one milestone I know I'm not quite ready for.

Three-Day Weekends

It's Sunday right now, but I would like to refer to it as Saturday Number Two. It's amazing what a difference one additional weekend day can make, which is causing me to think about summer. There are 22 school days left. Summer is looming. And I'm beginning to worry I'm not taking full advantage.

I'll be spending a little time in California, hosting my 13-year-old cousin in NYC for two weeks, and making a trip home to Arkansas. This leaves roughly three weeks of un-used time. Will I stay at home or drive somewhere I haven't been before? I've never been to Canada, maybe this is the time for me to go.

Or, maybe I should do the reasonable thing and work some temp job to try to pay off my car, a.k.a. the financial bane of my existence. But I guess that depends on what kind of reasoning I'll be using to make my decision.

Before I begin to make myself crazy, I get down to a little googling. What should a teacher do with all this time off? Suddenly, I have a whole new list of options! I could do the Teacher at Sea program, or should I try to get into the Teacher's Belize Summer Workshop? Maybe I should shell out the extra money to go to the Educator's Symposium, which advertises itself as "an electrifying event to create electrifying results."

I guess the only remaining question is: Do I want to be electrified, or do I want to pretend that I exist outside of my job for a few weeks?

Why Am I Awake?

It was approximately five hours ago that I was saying good night to my roommate and making my way to my bedroom. Except then she made a pitiful groaning sound, and somehow convinced me to stay up watching our latest Netflix arrival: Season One of Grey's Anatomy.

For not having cable, I sure have been watching a lot of TV lately, and it's not something I particularly like. I get sucked into something, can't stop watching it, and get into the typical I-choose-better-movies-from-Netflix-than-you-do argument with my roommate. I claim this argument is all in jest, but my roommate is still reeling from her recent viewing of The Importance of Being Ernest.

Let's not get into all of that, though. The point is, now we're both wired and I am stuck with the age-old question: To eat or not to eat? Anytime I am up past midnight, I get extremely hungry, usually for a cheeseburger. Right now, I am dying for chocolate ice cream.

So now, I'm very hungry with nothing to eat in the house, have gotten hooked on yet another television show, and am blogging to try to make myself sleepy when I really don't have to anything to write about. I apologize for you submitting you to this...

A Fan is Born

Last night I went to my first professional sporting event in New York City. My roommate's mother won free tickets to see the Mets play the Phillies at Shea Stadium. When we took our seats at 7:00, in the field box between third base and home plate, we had no idea what was in store for us. If you somehow have not heard yet, I'm referring to the sixteen innings of the most exciting baseball I have ever seen! At the end, when Beltran hit the game-winning homerun, my roommate and I jumped up and down, screaming like crazy and giving high-fives to all of the fans around us (who, unlike us, knew who Beltran was before the game started.)

I have never been much of a baseball fan, but after last night, the Mets have won my heart. The fans around us were great, I learned that there is such a thing as a fourteenth inning stretch, and I had plenty of time to learn about the players as they took the field inning after inning after inning.

I can't wait to go to another game, and have already made plans to go to another with fellow-Mets fans from work...to the great dismay of the Yankee fans from work who have spent two years tring to recruit me to their side. Even with a measly four hours of sleep, I'm still on high from that game. Meet the Mets! Meet the Mets! Step right up and greet the Mets!

Dear Blog

I am sorry that I have neglected you. I've been really busy. I know, it's not a good excuse. You're used to nearly daily contact. But my internet has been working intermittently at best. And one time I typed an entire entry only to find that I had lost my internet connection, then accidently deleted the whole thing. I admit, I was angry and gave you the silent treatment, but I apologized later. Isn't that enough?

I really do love you, even though I don't always say it. I'll try to be better. I hope you can forgive me over time.

Love,
Sam

It's Official

I am reading the paper, and listening to country music. Listening to country music! It means I'm homesick, which seems to hit hard whenever I'm creeping up on the time of departure to go back and visit family and friends. This morning (and yesterday) I've been listening to Sara Evans, which is your basic Introduction to Homesickness (a.k.a Homesickness 101.)

Fortunately, I'm leaving on Thursday morning which means I probably won't have time to go through all the stages: Sara Evans to Garth Brooks to Statler Brothers to the most advanced stage of Reba (no last name necessary here.)

There is some country that you might hear coming out of my speakers at other points in the year, but those listed above are the artists that I would never have listened to while I was living in Arkansas, let alone once I left! Yet they're perfect for a little solo sentimentalism on the Saturday before I go home to see my younger brother get married.

As I'm listening to Sara Evans, I think to myself, "She is just like me." She is talking to scarecrows and looking for a brown-eyed boy to love, her momma is steady as the sun, and she is born to fly.

Okay, I've probably said enough. Pretend like I never mentioned it.

Testing Boundaries

Due to events I won't go into here, my right arm has been in a splint and a sling since Monday night. (And yes, I am right-handed.) I am off of work this week and have generally been bored out of my mind. Add to that how tired you can become when you're trying to do everything one-handed and you can easily see how this has been a looooong week.

At the same time, though, I have been testing my one-handed/left-handed limits. I can now flip a burger, wash my hair, and put on most items of clothing without a problem. I'm still challenged by using a can opener and fastening the clasp on a bra, though.

Today, I decided to make the ultimate excursion: a trip to the laundromat. I plotted out a plan for getting everything down the stairs, chose the essential things that needed to be washed, and boldly went where I have so thoughtlessly gone before. I was feeling pretty proud of how I was doing, until I couldn't pull my clothes out of my laundry bag to put them in the washer. Before I became too frustrated, a very kind woman came over and held the laundry bag open while I put the clothes in.

While I have become better in recent years at accepting help from others, this was definitely testing boundaries in a whole new way. This stranger leaned into the bag to help me even more. This stranger was loading my clothes into the washer. This stranger touched my underwear. I thanked her as we finished loading the washer, and I really did mean it. But a part of me also wanted to just disappear.

I realized, even as I proudly opened the detergent, set aside the lid, and poured the soap into the machine, that my behavior is ridiculous. What is it that has me, and many of my peers, so hesitant to accept assistance even when it is clear that we need it from time to time? Moreover, if the roles had flipped, I would have offered assistance without a second thought. Why is there such pride in independence, even in instances when it is much more practical to work as a team?

I'm about to go back to the laundromat to load my clothes into the dryer. I know I'll publish this post, send these questions out into the void, and go try to do my laundry all by myself.

Direct Correlations

DC #1: Beautiful weather and decreased amount of time spent on computer, and therefore blogging.

DC #2: New outdoor table and increased amount of time spent on balcony.

DC #3: First-time spectator at lacrosse game and increased amount of time spent looking for a lacrosse team for beginners.

DC #4: Brother's approaching wedding and increased amount of time spent avoiding future purchase of clear shoes bride requested all bridesmaids to wear.

DC #5: Purchase of cheap books at a thrift store in Indio, California and inability to stop reading Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, researching Fannie Flagg, and being shocked at the fact the book is nearly 20 years old.

DC #6: Broken cell phone screen and decrease in contact with all friends coupled with increase in time spent organizing teaching materials.

DC #7: New cell phone coupled with loss of all phone numbers stored in old phone and reading almost the entire Sunday paper this morning...which usually doesn't happen because I feel the need to make use of those last free weekend minutes.

DC #8: Spending five minutes creating list of direct correlations and desire to stop blogging for the day.

Surprising Productivity

I woke up this morning, and immediately began working on my final paper of the semester. Two hours later, it was complete, so I got up and swept the apartment, cleaned the dishes, and cleaned the bathroom. What is going on?

Now, I have about an hour and a half before I got to my friend's baby's christening, then my long-awaited first Ultimate frisbee pickup game of the spring.

It's going to be a good day. And after the past two horrible days, it's definitely due.

Stolen from a blogger who stole it from another

At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule, and a calculator. At a morning press conference, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. The FBI is charging him with carrying weapons of math instruction. Al-gebra is a fearsome cult," Gonzalez said. "They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like 'x' and 'y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns', but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval withcoordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, 'there are 3 sides to every triangle'. "When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes."

National Geographic Day!!

I walked out the door this morning to find my car with a flat tire. I am fully capable of changing a flat tire, but called Kia Roadside to have them do it for me for free. I spent the unexpected extra hour I had cleaning up and getting organized. It was the best hour-late-to-work morning I've ever had.

I love coming back home after a good vacation. I'm so refreshed and ultra-productive.

And, on top of all this productivity, today is National Geographic day! It's not an official holiday, but it is the day I receive both National Geographic and National Geographic Kids magazines in the mail. I learn all sorts of amazing things, that I submit my roommate to relentlessly. While she's trying to work, I have about three things I must, must, must tell her every time I turn the page in the magazine. Luckily, she pretends it doesn't annoy her.

Now I'm going to force myself to work a bit on a paper for class. Three weeks left of grad school!

I'm in Trouble

My mind and body are apparently still on vacation. It's 12:15, approximately 3 hours past my typical school-night bedtime. But I am not the least bit tired. Instead of going to bed, I am wasting time on myspace. I have found several people from high school, and my young cousin who is a few days away (if not less) from becoming a father. Very strange. People are married, have children, and live all over the place. They have pictures and comments that, though they are staring me in the face, do not make sense with the memory I have of these people from so long ago.

I don't think I actually believe I'm going to work tomorrow. I did such a thorough job of vacationing, that I believe it is permanent. I have a feeling I'm going to get a rude awakening (pun intended) tomorrow morning.

Hesitant Re-entry

I am in a computer lab at the University of California - Riverside campus, procrastinating on work that I have due on Thursday back in that distant land of Queens, New York. My friend, who goes to school here, will be back in 2.5 hours to pick me up. So, this will be brief.

My friend Sharon and I just re-entered the real world last night after 6 days of camping/backpacking/hiking in the Joshua Tree National Park. It was absolutely phenomenal. I feel rested, re-centered, and happy.

I also learned many new things:

• (Prior to the flight to California, I went to my first Passover dinner with my friend Sharon's family.) Almost every part of the dinner was wonderful. I will never eat gefilte fish again. No matter what Sharon's dad says...
• You can in fact, eat an entire apple, including the core. This is a new favorite hobby of mine.
• L.A. is not as evil as I once thought.
• Heavisome is not a word.
• The desert, while a dry heat, is still very, very hot.
• When you think you have gotten a good tan, but you've haven't showered in five days, most of the brown color washes right off of you.
• When without a corkscrew, you should not push the cork into the bottle of wine, unless you enjoy being splattered in the face. (Fortunately, I learned this lesson by watching Sharon.)
• Wild desert turtles are the most chill creatures on the face of the planet. But if you're not paying attention and you scare one, the sound of the turtle withdrawing into it's shell sounds just like the hiss of a snake.
• When you've hiked for six miles and finally find the oasis you've been searching for, nothing beats cold water, crackers with cheese and mustard, and laying on the sand underneath tall palm trees.
• There are no unattractive men who are serious rock climbers. (Why this is, I have no idea, but I'm fairly certain that it is completely true.)
• When you've been on an amazing vacation that truly lets you forget all your worries, it's hard to go back to the real world. Especially when it's a grey computer lab and your textbooks you hesitantly packed eight days earlier. So much for being brief...