Everybody loves a sunset

Especially from the window of an airplane, getting ready to fly someplace they love, to see people they love, at the end of a very long and exhausting month of 10 hour work days and disappointing test scores and too little sleep and one very nasty cold.

Woke up this morning at Shan's, maybe three blocks down the street from my old apartment on Briar, in the middle of my old neighborhood. I'm drinking some Taiwanese green tea, wearing fuzzy tights and a tank top and feeling cozy and leisurely. Riding through the city to get to Shan's I was surprised at how not-weird it was to be back. I remember when I came home to the states from my semester in Vienna - things seemed strange and everything that seemed familiar was like seeing a long-lost friend. This is completely different. I just feel like I've been away for a few weeks on vacation and now I'm back. It's a nice feeling, that a place you got to know and feel safe in is still there, still familiar and doesn't demand you live in it to feel connected to it.

SLDs and IEPs

I'm taking this online class right now with UNCC (towards my Master of Arts in Teaching) that talks about "diverse learners." Basically, this means kids with learning disabilities, behavioral disabilities, kids who are English language learners, or who have some other issue that classifies them as EC (Exceptional Children.) I teach three blocks of inclusion, which means all of my classes have a variety of EC kids included with other non-EC students. Their issues or disabilities are ALL over the map, and are challenging, heart-breaking, and aggravating as hell in turns. Or, all at once.

To give you a little idea of what some of these kids are like, and the challenges they face just PASSING a class, here's one of my recent forum posts from my class. (We have to post three little reflections every week.)

So here's my frustration with IEPs. As I've mentioned, I teach inclusion classes, and have a LOT of kids with IEPs and 504 plans. Their IEPs say things like "extra time on exams" or "testing in a separate setting" or "read aloud their tests." Okay. That's all well and good, and those accommodation definitely help them come test time. But what IEPs don't do is give me any idea of HOW to actually help these kids LEARN better.

We try to use a variety of teaching strategies, and try to engage kids with different learning styles, and so on and so forth. Obviously there is a LOT more improvement we can do in this area, and there's lots to learn about how to best teach all of our students. But I find myself just at a loss with some students, particularly those SLD kids that have retention and comprehension problems. I can sit and talk through an assignment with a student and watch the wheels in his or her head just spinning and spinning without gripping anything.

One student in particular (although there are several) has unbelievably bad retention; you can tell him what a word means, have him say it back to you, and then five minutes later he can't remember it. This same student has a really hard time making sense of what he's reading. We can read a sentence like "President Obama opposes the ban on gays serving openly in the military and wants Congress to repeal the law" and when I ask him to talk through it with me, and ask him "What does Obama want Congress to do?" this student will think out loud something "Obama opposes...with the gays...they are serving openly?" He can carry on a perfectly intelligent sounding conversation with you about his life, but when faced with a piece of text he has absolutely nothing to even grab on to. It's as though he's reading a foreign language with nothing familiar to guide him to meaning.

It's students like him that motivate me the most to learn how to teach better, and at the same time make me feel like I'm hitting my head against a brick wall, or whatever metaphor for futility you choose. His IEP provides no guidance as to how to help him LEARN, only guidance as to how to make it easier for him to show that he HAS learned what little he actually retained. I hope this class will give me some practical ways to help him, and my other students like him, make some degree of progress and acquire new skills.

I can name at least four other students right now who are similar to the one I describe above, in that they struggle so painfully hard to hold on to even the simplest piece of information - and yet sometimes will pull the most random facts out of thin air. Their reading comprehension skills are so bad as to make reading almost a completely non-viable way to acquire information independently. I honestly do not know if their challenges would have been made easier by better teaching throughout the rest of their academic careers. My hunch is yes, but that it would have taken extraordinary teaching to get them up to grade level, and it's going to take beyond-extraordinary teaching to even get them half-way to where they should be. I honestly don't know if we're up to that. I hope we can figure it out. These kids deserve so much more than what they've been given so far. They deserve every chance I've had, and it's just plain shitty that they've had to work so much harder to get just as far as they have.

Hey October, where the heck did you go??

Seriously though. The last two weeks have gone simultaneously very, very slowly and astonishingly fast. I am thoroughly exhausted, have been living off not-enough sleep, with no time for breakfast, and Bojangles for dinner. Consequently, I woke up yesterday with a monster of a cold. My face feels like it's being pounded by mallets. I've been throwing down EmergenC, stocked up on anti-viral Kleenex, and my skin feels crawly and gross. Not a fun way to spend my Saturday (and, so far, my Sunday). But...I'm going to Chicago on Thursday to visit for the long weekend, and I'm pretty ridiculously excited about that. A light at the end of the tunnel!!

In the meantime, I've accomplished a few things the last two weeks.

I had a bunch of friends (including my sister!) over for dinner. I made curry and we drank a lot of beer.

I repainted a shelf that my old lady neighbor friend Genevieve gave me. It was dirty black when I got it, with a dead cockroach sliding around on the bottom shelf.

And now it's a kind of robin's egg/turquoise! Matches my Kandinsky and Picasso prints.


I stocked up on flannel from the Goodwill!


This morning, I decided I should put a coat of satin poly on the bookshelf, and repaint the white plastic deck furniture Genevieve has also given me. So I threw on clothes and went outside to go to the Home Depot, only to find my anole friend camped out on my car.


I spent 10 minutes chasing him around the car until he finally jumped off. Pretty ridiculous. I'm glad nobody was around because they'd have seen me walking in circles around my parked car saying things like "Seriously? C'mon friend!" to a small lizard. He kept changing from green to brown as I chased him around the car; pretty adorable. And...since I finally have a new phone(!!!!) I could actually take pictures of him.
I finally pulled the car out of the car port and got him to run off into the bushes.

For the remainder of my Sunday, I'm collecting sources for our kids to use to research their current events project. They're each going to do a presentation on some issue they feel strongly about. Our options so far are: Prop 8/Gay Marriage; the Westboro Baptist a-holes/free speech; Islamic Community Center/Mosque in NYC; Texas and their social studies standards/are we a "Christian" nation?; CA Prop 19/legalizing weed (guaranteed to be a favorite); AZ's immigration law; offshore drilling; and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools' decision to close/reshuffle a lot of low-income schools in Charlotte.

I'm also going to try out Krylon's Fusion paint, which is supposed to stick directly to plastic without any sanding or priming.

Is it wrong that I'm way more excited about the latter?

Vermiculture Composting!!! Worms!!! Hooray!!

I woke up this morning at 9:30, which you'd think was a nice normal time, except I went to bed around 3 and somehow my body STILL doesn't get the concept of sleeping in. Compared to my usual 5 though, I guess 9:30 is a big deal. Anyway, I decided if I was going to be awake for a larger part of the day than I had planned, I should do something with it. (Besides the silly UNCC assignment I have to submit before midnight. Ugh.) I've been reminiscing about Chicago lately, with the "fall" weather here in Charlotte skirting around an appropriate level of cold. One of the many, many things I loved about my life there was my giant bin of worms!!
It sat in the corner of my Chicago kitchen, and as you can see in the photo, was always kind of big and awkward. Super convenient for chucking vegetable peelings in as I was cooking, but also pretty ugly.

So, for my new worm bin, I got a smaller Tupperware:

For anyone who's interested, it's incredibly easy to convince worms to make you some compost. At the nature museum in Chicago, we did a bunch of workshops for people where they got to take home little starter bins and they were always a big hit. You just need a Tupperware bin with a lid, wet newspaper, a drill, and worms.

You can get red wigglers (also called red worms, or if you're super fancy, Eisenia foetida) at PetSmart. Most pet stores carry them as food for toads and lizards and whatnot, but they aren't always in stock. You don't want night crawlers or earthworms - they're totally different. The guy at PetSmart had three containers today, but I just grabbed two.

There's some estimate I've read that says something like you need two pounds of worms for every one pound of food scraps each day. Since I do not produce a pound of food waste every day, I did not get two pounds of worms. That's like 2000 worms. I think I had about 200 worms to start with in my Chicago bin, but they reproduce quickly when they're happy, so I had a lot more than that when I finally gave the bin away before moving.

They come packed in some peat-mossy-type bedding, which I just dumped into the bins along with the worms. Along with the worms, you put in a good layer of damp newspaper, cut into strips or shredded. Easiest way to get it right is to dunk a big wad of it in water, then wring it out like a sponge. The newspaper should be damp but not drippy.

The worms will eat the paper, and it gives them something to burrow in. Then when you start to add food scraps, you bury the scraps under the paper and the worms will go to town. You can use brown grocery bag paper too.

Make sure you've got holes drilled in the lid for ventilation, and you're good to go. With a lid on it, you shouldn't have to moisten your worms much, if at all. Keep them someplace that isn't too cold or too hot, and if the bin is see-through like mine, someplace dark. Just add food scraps under the newspaper bedding, and sooner or later your bin will start to look like a pile of compost instead of a pile of newspaper.

To harvest it, what I always did was shove all the composty-stuff to one side, put in new newspaper and food scraps on the other side, and in a couple days all the worms will move over to the new food. Then you can just scoop out the compost, sift through it to make sure you don't have any stragglers, and it's good to go for your plants! You can put most plant-based food scraps in it, but some things like onions and broccoli will start to smell bad before your worms can break them down fully. Also avoid citrus fruits - they're not a big fan of those. But anything else, raw or cooked, as long as it isn't oily, and doesn't include animal products. They can eat tea bags and coffee grounds too. My little guys have some old apple chunks and spent Earl Grey to get started on. Tasty treats.

I'm so happy to have some worms back in my life. It felt so wrong throwing carrot peelings in the trashcan when there are starving worms in China.

Campbell the Band

I was just turned on to these guys last night, in the form of an invitation to go see them Friday. I'm always up for live music, but then a quick google turned up their MySpace which turned up several songs and several videos (my friend Aaron shot this one, actually). I love this guy's voice, and I feel like there's a healthy dose of Sufjan in there...which is always a good thing.



http://www.myspace.com/campbelltheband

Go away, stuff.

I have a fear of being trapped in stuff. This might have something to do with growing up in my house, where the chair-to-family-member ratio is about 8:1 and the book-to-family-member ratio is probably in the neighborhood of 175:1. It also comes from moving into three (and out of two) apartments in three cities in the last three years. Nothing makes you realize how much crap you have that you don't need more than moving. I love getting rid of things and there's something satisfyingly freeing about throwing bags for the Goodwill in my trunk. Yesterday, I went through my bookshelf and my closet and got two big grocery bags out the door and out of my life.
Books are one thing I have a hard time parting with, but most of the ones I dumped were either freebies or were for college classes or were fluffy, silly books to begin with. I'm pretty ruthless with my clothes, although I have a bad habit of saying "Oh, but I could re-sew this into something else!" about items that have nice fabric or some other vaguely appealing feature. However, I have a lot less storage space in this apartment than in my last one, so it just doesn't make sense to keep a bunch of clothes I don't really wear and don't have a place to store.

So with two big bags of stuff gone, I felt justified buying a flannel shirt and a jumper and a few other fall things from Target. AND...finally spending a $20 Amazon gift card. Cubic-foot for cubic-foot, still a net loss. I got four books. Two novels (Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann and Little Bee by Chris Cleave) and two Christian-y books (Crazy Love by Francis Chan and A Praying Life by Paul Miller). I will be sure to let you all know if they're good.

I'd like to marry Wendell Berry

I've been reading a collection of Wendell Berry's essays lately. Usually I don't read things with a pencil in hand unless it's for a class or something specific. But Berry is so full of beautiful beautiful language and precise ideas and ...ah!! I just love him. It's going to be difficult for me to restrain myself from posting daily excerpts accompanied by rapturous, rambling praise. However, there were two brief passages I read today in his essay "A Native Hill" that I thought were just very lovely, and that said similar things in different ways.

"The hill is like an old woman, all her human obligations met, who sits at work day after day, in a kind of rapt leisure, at an intricate embroidery. She has time for all things. Because she does not expect ever to be finished, she is endlessly patient with details. She perfects flower and leaf, feather and song, adorning the briefest life in great beauty as though it were meant to last forever."

I think that just struck me because my life feels so striving, sometimes. Always trying to get the next thing done, the next task accomplished, the next goal met. Which is good, of course, or can be, but leaves a residual frustration that I can't fully devote myself to any one thing because I have such limited time in which to do so much. Surely that can't be the way God intended us to live out our days. Lilies of the field, and don't be anxious about anything, and all that, right? The other passage (on the opposite page from this one) is this:

"Too much that we do is done at the expense of something else, or somebody else. There is some intransigent destructiveness in us. My days, though I think I know better, are filled with a thousand irritations, worries, regrets for what has happened and fears for what may, trivial duties, meaningless torments - as destructive of my life as if I wanted to be dead. Take today for what it is, I counsel myself. Let it be enough...We are in the habit of contention - against the world, against each other, against ourselves.

It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are."

I think, for me at least, so much of that constant striving and grasping and anxiety appears when I refuse to allow that I'm small, and not God, and can't do it all by myself. I can't, by sheer force of will and strenuous effort, learn to be better than I am. Yes, of course you can work to "improve" yourself...all those things we resolve to do differently with each new year. But letting things be enough, resting in the knowledge that the answers are external to ourselves, that the ends are bigger than ourselves... oh Wendell. Why are you so old and married?