The title of my peice is: PIG PICKIN'

Let me explain a pig pickin' to you the way it was explained to me by a fellow teacher- a native of the great state of North Carolina.

"Well, it's a pig pickin'. You know. A pig pickin'. What? You've never heard of a pig pickin'? What do you do at your family reunions? Well, a pig pickin'-- you don't just do it for anything. It is sort of special. Takes a lot of work. So you get a pig and you roast it all nice for a long time. But wait. Before you roast it, you cut the head off and throw it in the lake. What do you mean, what do I mean? You cut off the head of the pig, and you throw it in the lake. That way, the fish will all come to nibble off it and you can fish and get a bunch of fish for dinner too. So you roast it and then you all pick off peices of the pig and eat it. Now, that is some fun, boy."

So, what I get from this bizarre ritual is that they have a family meal around a lake as they watch a decapitated pig head bob up and down in the water as it is being feasted upon by fish. That is some fun, boy. Gross. Who am I to throw stones?

I had an amazing experience today. I thought my classes were going to the computer lab, so I didn't plan a thing. I walked them to the lab only to find out that I had the wrong day. So I had an hour and a half with each class to fill and no plan. But I took them back and pulled something right out of the air to do. And it worked. That does a lot for my worry level. Now I know that I can fill time if I need to. Yea.  ¶ 5:53 PM

  Teach for America is a weird phenomenon. I don't think that anyone can fully understand it unless they have been "inducted" into it- which, for you non-TFA'er, is the actual word they use. I have been really down on this whole thing for a while. Last week was hard and I felt like TFA was bullshit with all their rhetoric. But when I sat down to really think about what I have been doing, and looked at the books that TFA gave us to read about how to teach, I had to admit that I wasn't doing all I could do. I have to take a lot of the blame for my kids being so bad right now.

I haven't been as organized as I need to be and I haven't been following the lesson planning model that TFA gave me. As I was reading through it again- I had somehow forgotten that I really needed to lesson plan- I realized that I was creating way too much opportunity for my kids to misbehave. Don't get me wrong- I don't make kids cuss and throw chairs. Some of them certainly just have anger problems and years of shittness in their lives that my "Harmony" game couldn't fix. But some of them are just confused and bored, too, and that is about me.

The nice thing about teaching is that I feel like I start over every Monday. So, once again, I am going in there with a new plan of action. I am also going in there knowing that this weekend is a three day weekend. And, I got to go out to Raleigh last night with my roomate D and my friends Owen and Charles. I felt like a real person.

Keep me in your prayers, heart chakra, thoughts...  ¶ 12:13 PM