Wednesday, October 22, 2003

What freaks me out the most about this whole teaching gig is how different each day can be. Yesterday, I came home and just crawled into the hole of my couch to die. Today, I am totally energized.

The kids and I just totally grooved on each other today. I was joking with them, they were joking with me. Even when I had to discipline a couple of them, they took it good naturedly, as did I.

I try to think every day about what I did differently...and some of it I can control, for sure. But so much of it is personality. So much of my happiness depends on fifty different kids mornings, nights, and class right before me. When things are good, they are so good and fun. When they aren't good--well, you have all seen the effects.

The spaghetti dinner last night was a trip. I got to hear, first hand, racism in schools and how it effects education. Little Miss Bay Area in the South (me) tries to keep my mouth shut about most things that smack of liberalism...but I thought it wasn't extremely "liberal" of me to mention the fact that the high academic club (the beta club) was 95% white in a school where our students are at least 95% black. It seemed to me an obvious issue and something that would be obviously wrong. The teachers that I was talking to, however, disagreed. The two comments I got were, "Well, the white kids are the good kids" and "I just say screw the other kids; I'm going to take my good little white kids and focus on them". Yikes. I knew these attitudes existed, but I never thought people had the nerve to just outright say it. In the West, people are more politcally correct than that. I don't know which way is worse; to just say racist things or to just create policies that are essentially racist but be too classy to verbalize.

But on a lighter note, two of my kids were in the choir and two in the band. They were so cute and proud of themselves. The band was terrible, in a very charming way, and I never thought I would be so pleased to sit through screaming saxophones and warbly flutes. I love to see my kids succeed at things.

Time for my Baby Story nap...yesterday, they did quadruplets, which was so exciting I couldn't sleep. I hope today is a calmer one-baby-at-a-time day. ¶ 12:53 PM