Happy Christmas!!

Christmas - a time to rejoice in the birth of Jesus and spend time with family celebrating this awesome miracle! We are staying here for the holidays this year, so we had to get in the spirit:

Brad really wanted a Christmas tree. I didn't want to find space to store an artificial one the other 11 months of the year. But Brad really wanted a Christmas tree. So, like a good wife, I gave him one. By stapling garland to our wall in the shape of a tree and decorating it with all our ornaments.

Nice surprise for when he came home from work that day. And personally, I love the space saving aspect of it. It looks pretty sweet too and sure beats the 2 foot mini tree on our counter.

(ps. Thanks to Lacy for giving the garland to my mom who in turn decided to bring it out to me for some reason - it's been put to good use :D)

Us at the Roaring Twenties Enterprise Christmas Party

We will certainly miss our crazy huge families this weekend and all the delicious food, but it is nice to be able to start our own tradition and attend the Christmas services at our church here. And we're not missing the white stuff too much yet...the patio door is open and I am enjoying the sounds of the waterfall on our "lake."

Parental Overload Fun

Brad and I had visitors for the week surrounding Thanksgiving - 4 parents and 2 grandmothers to be exact. All at the same time. It was quite crowded in our apartment to say the least, especially considering the card table that is our kitchen table. But it was absolutely wonderful to see everyone!!

At first, it was only Brad's family. Lucky for all of us, we were invited to a distant relative of Brad's for Thanksgiving dinner so we didn't have to try to cook a huge meal for ourselves. See, Brad's grandma has a cousin who lives in Phoenix, who in turn has family out here. Their daughter invited us all for to her house. Strangely enough, Brad realized he works with her son at one of his branches. They decided they were 5th cousins. Did you follow all that? Just summarize it all to a crazy small world and we have family we'd never met before down here (but we're glad we did)!

. .

We tried out a few Christmas card poses while we were there.

My parents arrived the day after Thanksgiving, which also happened to be my dad's 60th birthday. Naturally we toasted this milestone with Templeton Rye. And of course, I made a giant '60' shaped cake with 60 candles, which he then had to blow out. Good times! As a birthday present, Brad took him golfing and they ate lunch at the Heart Attack Cafe - this disgusting burger joint that cooks fries in pure lard and makes milkshakes out of the stuff. The burgers are available in single, double, triple, or quadruple by-pass. They also make you wear a hospital gown and naughty nurses are your waitresses. Perfect place for a man-date.

We spent some time touring some nearby sites. We went to Goldfield, a ghost town, and took an interesting train ride around it, complete with a conductor full of facts and theories. In the background are the Superstition Mountains which are reportedly where either a lost gold mine is, where the government has a secret military base, or where aliens are hidden. You choose.

We drove on Apache Trail, which is a very narrow road that turns to gravel eventually. There were some sweet rock formations and plenty of cactus to be found.

I convinced everyone to come to visit my school and they helped clean my classroom! The dust is terrible in Arizona and we don't exactly have janitors who dust everywhere. They just do the basics - floors and trash. The moms also organized the boxes of books they had brought down for my students.

I had school all the next week so the family had to entertain themselves. I needed bookshelves for all the books I was now the proud owner of, so I set the men to work on a project. It turned into Mike's project mostly, but he did an excellent job building 2 very sturdy shelves for my classroom.

Most of the time our family was here, there was a cold spell with overcast skies and chilly temps. But in perfect Arizona send-off, we had a gorgeous sunny day when we dropped everyone off at the airport...just in time for them to get home to enjoy the big snow blizzard!

It's Snowing...Paper

It may not snow in these parts of Arizona but that doesn't mean my students shouldn't learn about it right? They went to town cutting snowflake decorations out of scrap paper. Sometimes you just have to let them play - and worry about the mess later.

Teacher Moment

Fridays are always chaotic at a school and behavior is usually leaning towards out-of-control...and today was no exception. But just small one minute out the entire 7 hours just made my day.

There is one student in my class who is incredibly low. So low that when he started the year, he could not even write his name without a model and when he did copy it down, the letters were barely recognizable. Counting 1-10 almost never happened without one or two numbers left out and nevermind reading words more than three letters long. On top of it all, he has the unfortunate setbacks of severe lack of motivation and behavior problems - especially defiant behavior. To me, it seemed as if he had slipped through the cracks and it was easier to ignore him when he was in the room rather than coax him into producing work.

I have done my best with him given my limited expertise on how to teach him. Slowly but erratically, he has made progress. And today took the cake.

My class does what we call the Mad Math Race - 12 addition problems in one minute. They start with adding zero and as they pass, move up numbers through 10, and then start subtraction problems. We track this on a big racetrack on the back wall and the kids love seeing their vehicle move. This particular low student never participates for obvious reasons. Well today, he was in the room when we did it. So I gave him the zeros sheet, a number he had finally figured out how to add just the other day. When I said "GO!," he faltered until I asked him, "What happens to the number when you add a zero?" It clicked and he was off...I watched him the entire minute as he sped down the sheet filling in answers. My fingers were crossed as I watched the seconds tick by. He finished a full 10 seconds before time was up. (jaws can drop here please)

All 12 problems complete. All 12 problems correct. Only teachers or parents of special needs kids could understand my feeling as I gave him his high 5 and his tablemates congratulated him ( I purposely sat him by some sweet, patient girls who are great at trying to help him). Of course, the class was soon back to its usual loud state but I am still grinning even now because he finally made it onto the racetrack - by doing it the same exact way as every other student.

And then there were 29...

I got a new student this week. That brings my count up to 29 students. I'm just happy she seems to be on track with grade level! Next week, we are taking a field trip with the whole 2nd grade (4 classes) to see a play in Tempe. It will probably be the first time the majority of these children have ever seen a live production. It is a Junie B. Jones play so should be entertaining! We will also be learning about the first Thanksgiving - I won't be filling my students' heads with thoughts of a rosy Pilgrim and Indian gathering exactly, but we will find out what life was like for both parties back in the 1600s. Got to start teaching accurate history sometime, right?

Brad and I celebrated 6 months of marriage this past week. Crazy how time flies!! Brad marked his survival by surprising me with a dozen roses. And then bought us a HDTV, so we finally own a television.

And if you're wondering about Brad, he is doing swell. He is enjoying his job and soon will be moving to work at the airport for 4 months. I'm not terribly excited because his hours will vary considering the airport is open longer but it will be great experience. There is a great work/life balance so he often gathers with his co-workers for happy hour and to watch football. Life is good - it's still in the 70s/80s during the day...in November.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Cotton, dairy cows, and children

A student's magic paper - black paint scratched to show the crayon beneath.

Everyone's favorite question to ask me is how I like teaching. Let me tell you, I dread that question - because I never know how to answer it. I think I've finally decided on one word: Unexpected. No positive or negative connotations attached, simply unexpected.

The sight of cotton baled in truck size loads or the smell of a large dairy farm are things I never expected from Arizona. It just never fit into my image of my new home. But in the town where I teach, these are an everyday occurrence. Along with my classroom - from everything I'd heard, I thought my class would be full of children who barely spoke English and who were years behind grade level. Not true. We are well into the second quarter of the school year and I suppose it is about time I share more about my class...

I teach 28 second graders who are incredibly diverse in their background. I have a handful of students who still read at a kindergarten level to those reading at 3rd, almost 4th grade. One cannot write his name without a model to copy while another knows her entire name in cursive and practices at every chance.

Some of my students get into books after a test.

They love the chance to relax and free read -

and I love the quiet sounds of pages being turned.

These children are incredibly thirsty for knowledge and even more so for attention from me. They are more frustrating and aggravating than I ever could have imagined - and if you knew me as a child, you know I have a good idea of what kind of emotions a child can come up with at any moment. Sometimes they tend to scream, kick the tables and walls, cry over the size of their cookie portion, roll their eyes at me or complain about the work. And yet, they come in early every morning to help set up the classroom, want to meet the mysterious Mr. White, and write in their journals how much they love me and think my class is the best ever. Like I said, frustrating!

I'll admit, there are days (emphasis on the plural) when I don't know how I will manage to get through the rest of the day or just want to give up and not go back. Chaos and stress reign and I am s l o w l y learning how to deal effectively with this and be more efficient. I have days where I actually feel like they were excited about a subject and learned something. Like the time I graded a test and realized they achieved a 96% class average - amazing!!! The one common thread of all my days is I come home exhausted. I never expected to be so drained from my job. I never expected to feel the ups and downs all within one lesson or day. I never expected it to be hard in this way - a way I can't really describe to anyone who is not a teacher. I think I didn't really know what to expect.

We spend most of our days doing reading and math, with some science or social studies thrown in occasionally. A lot of time is spent on behavior management and figuring out how to not waste learning time or distract Ms. White. The class is chatty beyond what I expected (payback maybe?) and we talk about respect frequently. My favorite part of the week is when we do art. We don't have art at my school so it's up to each teacher to incorporate it as they see fit. I do an hour of actual art instruction each week. We mixed paint to find out about secondary colors, learned about positive and negative space, have made our own "magic" paper, and are now starting a drawing unit. Many of the students lack creativity and I am determined to give them every opportunity to think outside the box. You should have seen them doing blind contour drawings - papers over their pencil to hide what they were doing as they attempted to draw flowers - from sight, not mind.

Our color wheels we painted hanging from the classroom ceiling. They had never mixed paints before!

Unexpected.

Into the woods

For the long Labor Day weekend, we decided to get out of Phoenix and see what else Arizona had to offer. A camping trip in the mountains was just the escape we needed from our adult lives! Liz's good friend, Lindsey, joined us for the trip. We drove about 4-5ish hours northeast to Big Lake, in the Apache National Forest. At 9,000 ft elevation, it was a gorgeous, green, and cool change from what we're used to seeing everyday - buildings and desert! The lake was huge and surrounded by open meadows. Edging this was the evergreen forest, where our campground was located.

Upon arrival, we followed the

basic rules of camping:

Step 1: Set up your tent (bonus points if its guarded by a dog to protect from bears)

Step 2: Make smores, no matter the time.

Brad also proved he was a man by building excellent fires for every meal.

We had plenty of time to relax over the weekend and enjoyed being outdoors for long periods of time without feeling the intense burn of the sun. We took a drive to explore the area and found:

plenty of cows... open scenery...

another huge lake....and even a waterfall!

And no long weekend would be complete without a large purchase, right? When we returned home, we went car shopping for Brad. Not exactly what we had planned so soon after buying Liz's new car but unfortunately, the Impala has been having a lot of difficulties. It's one thing to have no AC in Arizona but when the window is stuck in the door, that is a sign! So we found a new vehicle for Brad - a 2010 Jeep Patriot. We are excited to both have cars we no longer need to worry about breaking down on us and also to have more space to haul stuff around. We are already looking forward to our next camping trip!

Enter Ms. White, 2nd grade teacher

Every morning, I wake up and drive. And drive. I drive through a desert for about 40 minutes. It looks like this: open road, small mountains edging the horizon, and A LOT of cacti (the big kind). While I did not expect such a commute when I learned TFA was sending me to Phoenix, I do think it is better than driving in traffic in the city. See, I teach in a rural farming community. In the recent housing market crash, this small town was especially hard hit. There are empty lots and half built walls of communities-to-be where investors simply pulled out and left. The public school wasn't doing the best, so the charter school saw an opportunity.

Insert Vocabulary Lesson Here ----> A charter school is not a private school, it is a publicly funded school - free for all students to attend. Charter schools often open in areas where there is no choice for parents - the public school is the only school choice and it may possibly be under-performing. It's all about parent choice.

My school is in its 3rd year of operation. It has K-9th currently and is breaking ground on the high school soon. There are just under 800 students attending with a large waiting list. Second grade has four classrooms this year - this is where I come in. This is the first time TFA has teamed with this particular school and when I interviewed for the position, I did not realize where the town was - I just figured it was another southern suburb. Not quite, but I am happy with my placement. The smaller town feel is more my style than inner-city anyway.

I have 28 students in my classroom. Here is the front of the room and my desk - someone doesn't believe in teacher desks, so we use tables and get a filing cabinet and bookshelf for storage.

My behavior management system is clips the students have to move down colors when they are misbehaving. I've made quite a few kids cry over this...my bad.

My class theme is "Oh, the places you'll go" - a mix of traveling and Dr. Suess. The back wall has all of our goals where the students can track their progress over the year. Our big goal is 80% or better on math tests and 1.5 years growth in reading. Pretty big stuff! But I tell them they are scholars and no one else in the school may be doing this but they can - just a little ego inflating! Also on the wall are words per minute, sight words, math fast facts, and 1000s counting club. Whoooo data! I hung some string across the classroom to hang up their artwork too. Not trying to boast or anything, but I am proud of how the room looks! Well, except at 3:15 when the kids walk out of it, leaving it a disaster. But that's a story for another day!

Teach for America

"One day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education."

This is the driving force behind Teach for America (TFA) and before I launched into stories of my own classroom, I wanted to speak to why exactly Brad and I are in Phoenix to begin with. Most know the story but maybe not details, so here it is:

I certainly never thought I would teach. A lot of my former teachers think I'm crazy - probably because they taught me. I went to college for Political Science, bent on traveling and working internationally (what exactly was still to be determined) But my travels abroad taught me something about my own country, something a lot of people don't want to think about or admit: vast education inequality still exists. Only half of low-income students will end up graduating high school by age 18. That's 50% who do not graduate in one of the most developed, advanced, powerful nations in the world. That disgusts me. Why should economic status determine the kind of education you get? Why should race or ethnicity? Just because your family cannot afford to live in the suburbs and attend the nice school doesn't mean your inner city education should be of lower quality. By the time low-income students are in 4th grade, they are already two or three years behind their peers. What kind of success is that setting them up for? None, and this is exactly the problem. There should not be an achievement gap in this great nation but there is. So I joined TFA to help close the gap. In my mind, I would be a hypocrite if I went to work in an underdeveloped country before I addressed the same issues in my own country, a place where they should not exist anymore.

So what exactly is TFA? Teach for America is a national corps of college graduates and professionals who commit to teach for two years in under-resourced urban and rural schools. The majority of the corps did not attend college for education and most have never had any experience with teaching previously (pretty much ME). Most join the movement because they recognize education inequity is a persisting problem in our country and want to work to eliminate it. Just over 46,000 people applied last year with 4,500 people selected to join. I was one of those, so Brad and I packed our bags for Phoenix. This region was one of our top choices as it provided job opportunities for Brad (unlike some of the other regions I would have liked such as Native American reservations or Southern Louisiana).

In order to teach, I was granted an intern teaching certificate on the premise I will work towards full certification over the next two years. For me, these certification classes are tied into a graduate program at Arizona State University so in May 2012, I will be a fully certified teacher with a Master's in Education. To clarify a lot of misconceptions: yes, I still have to pay for grad school and no, there is no loan forgiveness. Teach for America doesn't pay me anything - I am an employee of my school and they cut the paycheck so I earn what any other starting teacher does in the area.

So for the next two years (and possibly more), I will be working in my own classroom to teach my students to dream. That they can do absolutely anything they want in life - their socioeconomic status does not have to hold them back. They can and will be successful in school. It may seem crazy and impossible given the vast achievement gap in this country and all the students who need a good teacher, but if I can reach my own students - it will have mattered to them and that's more than when I started.

Easier said then done.

Since you last saw us...

The last time many of you saw us, we were getting married. In case you haven't seen pictures, here is a link to our wedding photographer's blog posts about our wedding:

http://garnetphoto.blogspot.com/2010/05/liz-brad-wedding-preview.html

http://garnetphoto.blogspot.com/2010/05/liz-brad-married.html

A lot has happened since then! To catch everyone up to speed...

we escaped for two weeks to Florida and relaxed on the beach for our honeymoon. Glorious peace!! Then we flew home, packed up our lives, celebrated the weddings of some dear friends, said tearful goodbyes, and started driving cross-country - all in one week. Chaotic but we had no clue what kind of chaos awaited us in the southwest.

After two long (long) days of driving, we safely arrived in Arizona. Temperature: 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Welcome to Phoenix!!

For the next week, we enjoyed living in a dorm room at Arizona State University. Complete with a bathroom shared with the room next door occupied by two girls. This was Liz's first week of Teach for America, full of sessions about what she was to expect during her two year commitment. After this packed week, we had the pleasure of moving to a new dorm room in a new residence hall for Liz's six-week training institute (more on that later). This time though, we had a room with a private bathroom. While Liz spent all her waking hours learning how to become a teacher, Brad went to work at his new job. He soon realized this office wasn't the right fit for him, so he began seeking new employment. After six weeks of fine dorm living (pictures below), we were ready to become real adults in grown-up housing!

In the middle of July, we moved into our new apartment in Chandler, a southern suburb of Phoenix. Liz's parents and grandma were our first visitors who kindly drove all of our worldly possessions down to us. Thanks to our wonderful family and friends, we were blessed to have our apartment quickly furnished with our wedding gifts. (Thanks again - because of you, we actually have worldly possessions!) Wow, it felt good to have our very own place and not sleep in twin beds pushed together anymore. Brad recently started his new, new job while Liz continues to prepare for the school year.

Our new home! The living room (complete with fireplace for those cold nights?). Down the hallway is the guest bedroom and bathroom.

The dining room, kitchen, and master bedroom which has a large bathroom and closet.

The patio and our view.