And I'm Ms. Andersen again...!

Finally an update from the Delta, folks!

So I’ve been here in Mississippi for over two weeks now. Note the correlation with the two weeks since my last post. I have not worked this hard this sustainedly…well, ever. I occasionally worked hard in college, but never for days and weeks straight, and always with more sleep than five hours per night.


I wake up at five every morning. Dining hall for breakfast, pick up my sandwich and chips for lunch, throw them in our Delta State lunch bags, and then load onto the school buses that drive the 70 of us that work at the Merritt school site. (There are almost 700 people here at Institute, from different southern regions. We’re divided up among maybe 10 or 11 schools within about an hour’s driving distance from Cleveland, where we’re all staying.)

The school buses have no AC, but in the mornings this is usually okay. I try to sleep.

We get to our school a little before seven. Unload from the buses, and make our way to our classrooms. Each class is taught by two teachers. I teach the first hour of class, and do one complete lesson, then my partner teaches the second hour and she does another complete lesson. This week it’s World War II. Tomorrow I’m talking about rationing, War Bonds and the GI Bill. Yes, that’s a lot to cover in one 60-minute lesson, but the way things are structured for this summer school program, and for TFA, it’s …just really structured. Lots of material and not a lot of time. And all aimed for a test that will be used to judge our effectiveness, based on how many objectives our students met before and after our four weeks of class.

I am exhausted a lot. Today I’ve been able to take it a little easier tonight because I managed to get ahead this weekend. I don’t remember ever in college working this hard, or being this intentional about getting ahead in my work. In college, the only stakes were my grades, which I knew I could keep high without killing myself. Here, the stakes are real kids and their real futures. It kind of changes how you think about motivating yourself to get stuff done. I kind of miss just being responsible to myself, but then again...that’s a pretty surface-level way of living life.

I have a class of 22 high school juniors. Some of them know a lot already, from having taken the class already (even though they failed it). One student today volunteered that he knew the names of all the leaders during World War II, so he called them out as I wrote on the board “Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill…” and so on. Some of them don’t know a lot already, and clearly didn’t retain anything much from their first attempt at the class. And some of them might know things, but their literacy is so poor it takes a lot more effort to figure out what knowledge they are actually absorbing.

One student was getting 30s and 40s on his quizzes until I started going over and reading them to him, and then reading the possible multiple choice answers, and asking him to rephrase things to me. He got a 100 yesterday. But I suddenly see now how kids get written off as “dumb” or “lazy” when the truth is they have just never been given BASIC literacy skills. Like…basic basic. It boggles my mind how our country can so utterly fail so many kids. We’re the greatest country on earth and we can’t teach our kids how to f-ing read? Like, when did that even become acceptable? I don’t know…it just truly makes me angrier and angrier the more I see how we’ve given these kids this pathetic excuse for an education and acted like that’s good enough. They’re not going to do anything with their lives anyway, so why do they need to know how to read a novel.

As an example of what I mean about smart kids who haven’t been taught how to write, here are a few examples from my last homework assignment about the decision to enter World War II.

“No, I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have want to go to war because there wer no gruaraty we was going to win and if we lost we would have lost more then our love ones.”

“The my president we should stay out of World War II because of we would run out of America soldiers. President not saying we would lose but we have a good chance on having a lot of Americans crying and weeping instead of less.”

And this assignment was to write a letter home from Stalingrad.

“I Just Got finsh kicking some major butty. The Germans thought they had us but we went ham in that bit. But stuff been going good, Germany team was sick so some soilder die. So the war is goin good so far. I’ll see you when I get home. Bye.

And then there are some that are just sweet.

“I’m in Stalingrad fighting. Its cold and I’m getting sick. I’m so ready to come home mom. We are loosing this fight. I hope I come home safe to you mom. love you”

Amazing hospitality, and insect carnage

Made it to Mississippi! Woke up Saturday, bobbed around in Lake Sinclair for a while, then said goodbye to the Whitings (who are the best ex-boyfriend’s-parents a girl could ask for) and headed to Alabama where I was finally reunited with Anjana the amazing. We watched Marty McFly for a little, then she and Peter took me on a driving tour of Birmingham. Oh! This was after we got sushi and I ate seaweed that looked like one of those latex casts they do of veins and capillaries that you see in science museums.

And THEN we went on our driving tour, which began with the tail end of a gay pride parade closer to downtown, and then wound up with a couple beautiful overlooks as the sun was setting.

And then the next morning Anj busts out with cheesy eggs and gluten-free cornbread. Awesome.

Then I drove to Mississippi! Lots of hills, then lots of flat and trees, and then lots of corn. Corn, soybeans, and a whole hell of a lot of sky. And then heat!

And then Institute began! We don’t see students until next week, so thus far it’s been sessions, workshops, power points, and more group-work, partner discussions, and “think-pair-share” than I did in all of high school and college combined. I’m going to be teaching 11th grade U.S. History for four weeks starting on Monday. In MS, this is post-1877. So it’s westward expansion, industrialization, the gilded age, and so forth. Up to present day, I think, but I’m not sure. I’m really excited to be teaching my subject AND grade placement (I’m assigned to teach high school social studies in Charlotte) during Institute, since a lot of people aren’t.

Other tidbits about the Delta? There are a lot of mosquitoes. I literally just had to pause in the middle of typing the word “mosquitoes” to kill one on my arm. And I have bugspray on. At breakfast I killed seven, and smeared blood all over my white purse, which is kind of gross and a bummer. They spray pesticide in big noxious clouds off the back of pick-ups around campus here. They insist we can breath it to no ill effect, but I swear I could feel my cells mutating as it drove past.

But also, everyone here is so incredibly excited for us to be here. There were a ton of volunteers sitting around in tents to help us move in yesterday, and boy scouts to help us carry luggage. We got a whole packet of discounts and coupons from local merchants. One place has $1 drafts. The whole community here just seems so thrilled to have us, which is really kind of humbling and exciting. A lot of responsibility, but also just really encouraging.

Up at 4:45 tomorrow morning...!

Reason 837 that I moved back south

Three letters. Two of them are B and the other is Q. I don’t know what I was doing being a vegetarian all through college. I had no idea I was living so close to amazing piles of vinegar-soaked pork.

Taylor and her boyfriend Chris took me to a place in Winston that does Lexington style BBQ, which is apparently halfway between ketchup style and vinegar style. You get a little cardboard dish that’s mounded with meat on one side, slaw on the other. Plus hush puppies. And sweet tea. And, as an added bonus, stylish tobacco-themed décor. Good old Winston-Salem. Man, I love the south.


I spent tonight hanging out with Hope (my ex’s awesome mom) who’s putting me up at their lake house for the night. We got dinner and saw ‘Splice.’ Not sure what to say about that movie, except that A) it’s nothing like the previews (which didn’t exactly make me want to go see it) and B) that it involves human-animal cloning, spontaneous sex changes, cross-species reproduction, and a sex scene involving a prehensile tail.

Reporting from the Marriott...

No exciting photos today, I'm afraid. I have a pending post regarding Lexington-style barbeque that involves some tasty food photography, but we have no internet in our rooms here, so we have to come down to the lobby and the camera's in my room and my feet hurt...so, that will have to wait.

But a brief update! A) I'm 25 today. And I think I'm making my peace with the quarter-century mark, slowly but surely. B) I'm here in Charlotte for Day 2 of Teach for America induction. "Induction" sounds a little like we're shaving heads and passing out saffron robes, but it's really just orientation: to the city, to the school district, and some overview training on TFA's core values. Today was mostly spent at a meet and greet (i.e. short interviews) with principals. Right now there are three high schools hiring Social Studies teachers, so I met with all three. We all get jobs regardless, but I think the schools can express their preferences better if they've met us. The school district here seems to have a really great relationship with TFA, and the principals all seemed to want us, but they also asked a lot of questions about behavior management, working with at-risk populations, and being a new member of a team of veterans who already had a system in place (read: are you going to rock the boat too much?) It was nice though to actually meet real people who lead real schools with real student - it makes it easier to imagine this job as an actual job that exists in the real world, instead of a nebulous sometime-down-the-road kind of thing.

Tomorrow's going to be employee paperwork with CMS (the school district), signing up with UNCC for the masters program, and then some kind of cookout event at night. Then Thursday is the last day here before heading down to the Whiting's lake house on Friday on my way to Mississippi! And then on to Anjana's! It's been really great to catch up with so many friends the past month...I got to see Kristen this past weekend for the first time since we graduated!! And Taylor Kitz! And Alyssa! And Guts! And Nelson! And Mitchell! And Z! And Shan! With an appearance by Brian Locco! It's kind of fantastic having so many of my friends within driving distance. I miss Chicago a lot, but the east coast is starting to feel like home again.

Apartment? Check.

Done and done. I loved the first apartment I saw, and it was one of the cheapest on my list, and so that’s that! I looked at one other place just because I’d already made the appointment, but it was $75 more and not as big. My soon-to-be new place is in Myers Park, right down the street from some ridiculously large mansion sort of houses, so that makes me feel like it’s pretty safe. I can also walk to things! I am still not liking the fact that you have to drive everywhere. I love my little Camry, but the every-day, errand-running, stop-light-waiting, parking-lot-navigating, suburban car-driving lifestyle is not one I’m quite ready to embrace with enthusiasm. But from this apartment I can walk to a movie theatre, a Rite Aid, a Harris Teeter and a library. I have the bottom right half of the building.

Still, what I saw of Charlotte definitely doesn’t feel like a real city to me. It’s too clean and new and landscaped and upscale and shiny. Granted, I spent most of my time yesterday in Dilworth and Myers Park, which are pretty upscale neighborhoods I guess and I’m glad to be living there, given that it’s hard to know where’s always the safest place in a city you’ve never been to before. However. I think I’ll need to get to know this supposedly artsy NoDa area, so I don’t feel like I’m living in a rich-and-preppy wonderland of Starbucks and stores that sell Vera Bradley.

The apartment itself however is old and cool. (I was so distracted by its charm that I failed to take any pictures of the interior.) But…it’s a four-flat built in 1940-something. Original hardwood floors, real wood doors and beautiful trim work. The bathroom has black and white subway tiles like the 1940’s era bathroom I grew up with. The place even has one of those old phone nooks like my parents have in the dining room at home. Two bedrooms, big living room, small-ish galley kitchen with giant pantry and a back porch entrance, separate dining room with a screened-in porch. And it has central air. It’s old, beautifully maintained, way more space than I need, and doesn’t feel like it’s built out of drywall and vinyl. One of the other tenants is 97 and has lived there since the 1970s. I figure if someone chooses to stay there for 30+ years, it can’t be that bad of a place to live.

After I got back to Winston-Salem from Charlotte yesterday, I went to campus to get some extra copies of my transcript to have on hand for next week’s TFA “Induction.” I also took a walk over to Reynolda Village and took a detour into the woods on the way. Last time I was on campus, probably close to two years ago, I remember walking through the woods and looking at the turtles and ducks in the marsh that used to be a lake, and feeling melancholy about living in a big city with no marshes to be found. Ha! No longer. It’s good to be back, North Carolina.

So many candles!

I’m getting up bright and early and heading to Winston-Salem tomorrow! Since I won’t be at home for my birthday on the 8th, we had our little family party last night. My dad made me a cake, I frosted it awkwardly, and my siblings wrote “25” on it in candles. Only in Roman numerals, so it said XXV. Which takes a LOT of candles. I love my family.
We also grilled steaks, plum tomatoes and big mushroom caps. And ate corn on the cob and homemade Caesar salad. As my Nana asks rhetorically after each meal, “Isn’t food wonderful?”

Also, I said some mean things to the tinfoil roll and it ran away. Woops.