Sunday, August 24, 2003
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 Domenica and my friends Owen and Charles. I felt like a real person.

Keep me in your prayers, heart chakra, thoughts...