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« May 2004 | Main | July 2004 »
Yesterday I received an email from the always fabulous Allen K. Robinson urging me to do something with this picture of Republican senators Rick Santorum and Bill Frist getting awfully friendly with each other on Senate seersucker day. Here is what I've come up with:
A transcript of Rick Santorum's homophobe interview from April 2003 is availabe here.
Today I had my first day of Teach for America instruction and damn was it intense. I was up at 5:45 AM to get ready and get on the bus to go to school. We went through an intense morning of training. The teachers followed their lesson plans to the second, no joke. Anyway, after four hours of instruction this morning we ate lunch. I was finally awake at this point. After lunch and another session of crammed material we learned our teaching assignment for next week.
Next Monday I, along with three other people, begin teaching kindergarteners the next month. We will be teaching small children how to do the following things:
Math
Reading
Listening and Speaking
Science
I don't know about you, but I sure as hell couldn't do this stuff in Kindergarten. This is going to be pretty tough -- especially given language burrier issues. On top of this ... it's me. Scary stuff. My group isn't terrible to work with. Two girls are really great, but the third one is a know-it-all that won't concede anything and directs the discussion far away from where we need to be to get things done in order. It's kind of like a UDems exec meeting -- under ANY of the three most recent presidents.
UPDATE: The group got much better to work with today. We're actually far ahead of everybody else at our elementary school and probably in the institute.
As part of my Teach for America independent work I have to go to various schools to observe teachers. Today I went to Lincoln Elementary School, my old elementary school. I attended it for grades 3-5, which was from 1991 - 1994. Oddly enough, I got placed in my old fourth grade room for one of my observations. I was in room 21 with Mrs. Scherzer. The style of learning has changed a lot since I was there. Instead of having individual desks and dogmatic teaching the the classes are much more group oriented. Everybody sits at a table with six other students. This is to stimulate learning, I think. Besides that, there is more sitting on the ground and being read to as a group. It seems a lot more engaging and fun than when I went to school.
Being at the school brought back a lot of memories. I was in room 21 and I thought to myself, "That's where I sat for a whole year over a decade ago." I was then going through the people in my class and where they were situated. One person that immediately came to mind was my old friend Chris Coombs. We drifted apart in middle school and we had markedly different goals in high school. I've got no idea where he ended up. There were some others, but most aren't worth mentioning on this entry.
One person that is worth mentioning, though, is Amanda Smith. Amanda Smith was the first crush I ever had, and it was probably my biggest crush ever. The first is the biggest, right? Anyhow, I was crazy about that girl for well over a year and she knew it. Too bad she had no interest in me. In fact, she liked my good friend Mike Sullivan, also in room 21. I sat there for an entire year stirring over it. She later moved away to Las Vegas in 8th grade, when we both went to Palm Desert Middle School. I didn't even hear about it until two weeks after she was gone. I talked to her once on AIM in 9th grade. I haven't heard of her since. I tried to google her but sorting through all the Amanda Smiths out there is no easy task. With my luck she'll google herself, find this page, and post something. I'll then be as shy and embarassed as I would have been in 4th grade. Actually, I probably won't be, as I'm so much more mature... right. If by some ridiculously off chance you are reading this, Amanda, post something.
Besides 4th grade, I went by the bathrooms where Justin Israel and Matt Lingle got caught smoking a cigarette in the boys' room. I went by the library where we always used to look at pictures of whales mating because we thought it was funny as hell. I went by the wall that a kid in my class spray painted one weekend. On the playground I saw the place where I punched the school bully in the face. The best part of it was that he got suspended and I was not punished.
It's amazing the memories that you conjure up as you walk around somewhere you haven't been in a long time. I'm sure I'll do the same thing at UVA some day.
