The Five-Pointed Star of Institute

A wise man once said, "Institute is hard.  Seriously, it is."

Let me preface this entry by acknowledging that I have far too much to share and not enough of your attention span to share it in.  About half of TFA Institute has passed and I'm not sure if I'm any closer to figuring it out.  One thing is for sure: it's hard.  Coming in, I assumed that it would be difficult because of the difficulty of teaching in an urban summer school coupled with high expectations.  I've since come to realize that while this is absolutely true, the difficulty comes from trying to strike a balance between a number of necessities.  I've begun to call this the Five-Pointed Star of Institute.


     Think of it like a junker car that you drive 24 hours a day.  You find a way to start it up in the morning and get on the road, but a mile down you start hearing an excruciating scraping noise coming from the brakes.  You pull over and devote a couple hours to doing whatever you need to do to get your brakes working smoothly again.
     As you are finishing up, a kind passerby informs you that your tail lights are out.  You thank them and go to work replacing them.  Getting back in the car, you go to start it and behold - the car won't start.  You inadvertently messed up the electrical system while fixing the tail lights.  So you open the hood and it's smoking a little.  You address any number of issues that you think might lead to solving your problem, but none of them work.
     So you call a repair man who comes to your rescue.  Finally, having your car fixed, you get back behind the wheel.  You drive for a few miles and run out of gas.  You coast to a stop at the next exit and fill your tank halfway (you don't have enough money to fill it all up).
     Finally, you are ready to go.  You get back on the highway and see a traffic jam. Quickly slamming on your breaks, you are met with an excruciating scraping noise.  You pull over and devote a couple hours to doing whatever you need to do to get your brakes working smoothly again...

     Much like the many issues addressed to keep this car on the road, I feel my attention being pulled in many different directions at once this summer.  While I absolutely do need to focus on teaching effectively and drawing up lesson plans that will target my students' unique needs, I also need to devote time to learning, planning my move to Milwaukee, maintaining relationships, and simply surviving.

On The Teaching Front: 
     I am doing my practice teaching in a 3rd grade summer school classroom at Camras Elementary.  We found out just days before teaching that all thirteen of our students were English language learners and many had been living in the country for less than a year.  SURPRISE!  Many of our kids read on a first grade level, and that's primarily because they've never been taught English phonics.  Even the highest students in our class conversationally misspelled 4/5 words on the first drafts of a basic personal narrative we had them write.  Having now struggled through two weeks of teaching reading and writing, only 5 of our 13 students are at the level of mastery required to go on to Fourth Grade.


On The Learning Front:
     But Alex, if they're struggling that much, why don't you work with them extra after school?  An extra hour of phonics a day could solve all their problems!  I wish.  At 1:00 sharp after a morning of teaching, the kiddies run home and we are plopped on a bus and rushed to Piccolo Elementary where we have 3.5 hours of sessions on how to teach better.  I work with an incredible team of educators who are setting me up to be a phenomenal teacher once I get back to Milwaukee... but the fact remains that this takes away instructional time that I wish I had.  Some evenings, we get back to the Illinois Institute of Technology campus and I have even more sessions to attend, which takes away from lesson planning.

On the Living Front:
     And just when I find some spare moments when I think I can get ahead, I get a call from an apartment that I had left a message for earlier.  Or a school that wants to hire me.  Or the dry cleaners who misplaced my delivery information.  Yes, my attention is primarily here in Chicago where the stakes are high for my summer teaching, but the fact remains that I need to be moving into a brand new apartment in 3 weeks and I need to have plans for that too.  The first two weekends that I was at institute, I drove back to Milwaukee to do some apartment hunting, and I'm pleased to say I found the perfect place to live.  I have a beautiful studio apartment with a view of Lake Michigan locked down for the next year, and you should all come visit me.  But the fact remains, time spent shopping is time lost teaching.

On the Surviving Front:
     I get off the bus, quick change, and revise a lesson plan.  It's on the right track!  I print off the assessment that the kids will need to complete and run to the copy center to beat the line.  I'm feeling like I'm ahead of schedule and ready to start working on future plans!  Just then, I'm reminded... I haven't eaten in 8 hours... and the cafeteria closes in 20 minutes.  I can't tell you how many times I've had my momentum killed by either the need for food or the need for sleep.  When you consider that I get back to IIT at 5:30 and try to be in bed by 10:30 AND factor in a half hour to eat... it doesn't give me a whole lot of time to do everything else.

On the Relationships Front:
     And finally, the one thing that I think often gets overlooked at institute is the simple maintenance of relationships.  While it may not seem as noteworthy as other obligations, touching base briefly with family, friends, and significant others adds up.  It is very important for me to stay in touch with the people that I care about, but it's just so easy to push it off and then push it off again.

When it all comes down to it, there is simply not enough time in a day to do everything as well as I would like to.  I could fully invest myself in the moment and be the best teacher my current 3rd graders could ask for, but that would make me a poor student, a terrible son/brother/friend/boyfriend, and I would probably get sick and die.  Instead, I have find a way to balance my time perfectly, and just try to at least be effective at all five points of the star.

Now I'm off to work on those brake pads again... we're back on the highway at 5:30 tomorrow morning.

Transitions Within Transitions

We'll keep this one short seeing as sleep seems to be hard to come by... but there's just so much to say that I have to word vomit some updates.

Hello from Chicago!  Milwaukee Corps 2011 joined up with our counterparts from Chicago, Jacksonville, St. Louis, and Twin Cities at Illinois Institute of Technology this past Sunday.  It's supposed to be hard and prepare us for excellence, blah blah blah...  Here are the interesting things that you might care about.

1. Looks like I'll be teaching 3rd grade math and reading this summer.  I'll have you remember that my assignment is bilingual education, and I've been interviewing for middle/high school positions.  It makes sense if you don't think about it.

2. I wake up at 5:15 every day.  Whine whine whine.

3. The Minnesota Twins!  Holy cow they're awesome ever since I left!

4. We were just informed today that our fabulous regional Executive Director was so fabulous that he got promoted to the position "Greatest Leader Ever," and therefore he is being replaced by Maurice Thomas, 2010 Lehmann Award winner for Excellence in Teaching.  If you applied for TFA, you saw a video clip about him being an awesome teacher.  Moral of the story... Milwaukee's pretty well managed.

Now it's 10:17... I can still get 7 hours of sleep! Yes!

"It's like starting freshman year... except I like everybody."

Greetings one and everyone!

I write to you from sunny/rainy/cloudy/cold/hot Milwaukee!  It's the week of induction and I haven't seen weather change this rapidly this drastically save for in video games.  The first couple days here have been busy and inspiring as I've come to learn more about what we'll be doing over the next two years and all of the amazing people that I'll be doing it with.

Milwaukee is a beautiful city, but with some very real and serious problems.  We are a city with a rich history, yet still remain significantly segregated.  The disparity in academic achievement between students of color and their more privileged counterparts is among the highest of any city in the nation.  And so with this backdrop, we have begun to search for job placements that will provide us with the ability to make a positive change.

Today I interviewed with two schools, and recently found out I have a second interview with HOPE Christian High School.  We'll see where that goes... if it doesn't develop into a job, I'll likely work for Milwaukee Public Schools.

But on a less serious note, this corps is absolutely amazing.  There are approximately 50 new corps members being inducted with me, and I am yet to meet a single one that I don't absolutely love.  These people are unique, dedicated, and fun, and I am so honored to count myself among them.

Institute (a.k.a. a swift slap across the face) starts this weekend.  I'll keep all you interested people posted on new developments and whatnot.

The Prequel -or- For Those of You Who Don't Know Ben

          I remember when I was a wee lad in my Junior year of college and everyone and their mother made blogs so that "everyone could follow their adventures around the world."  I subscribed to dozens of essentially the same blog and paid half-attention to them for a handful of entries.  The lessons that I took away from this experience were twofold.  First, I don't care what existential life-changing discovery you made while walking along the Seine or getting stuck at an airport.  I'm happy that you're learning about yourself... but that knowledge does me no good.  And second, even if I had wanted to, I didn't have time to read a dozen blog entries every day.

          Moral of the story: throughout my undergraduate years, I found blogs to be lame.  Yet here I am, making my own blog as I open a new chapter of my life.  So allow me to be perfectly clear about my purposes for doing this thing:

1. I'm moving to Milwaukee later this summer and will be working as a Bilingual Teacher through Teach For America.  TFA recommends that Corps Members keep a journal or blog to maintain their sanity.  I enjoy my sanity, so there's that.
2. Making fun of Ben.

          That's all.  I have no other expectations for this blog.  That's not to say that you shouldn't read it... but I certainly have no delusions that lots of people will.  On the off chance that I develop some sort of a following, I'll try not to let my entries get long-winded so that they don't waste too much of your valuable time.

          So here we are.  Welcome to my Teaching in Milwaukee blog.  Nothing really gets going for a few weeks here, which means I still have most of my sanity about me (or at least something that slightly resembles it).  And so with that in mind, the rest of this entry is entirely devoted to Objective 2.

*Insert FRIENDS quote here* Now I'm too sweaty to continue writing.  I'm serious.  But not really.  Or am I? Now I'll take a 20 minute shower.  Or will I?  SORRY BEN!  Rango...

          More reflective and potentially serious posts to come... Cheerio.