About this Blog
a Teach For America teacher’s blog
I’m getting fat. I’ve picked up a few awful habits in past months and lately have spent a lot of time dedicated to thinking of why I haven’t taken care of myself. Why I’m not on fire. Why these are statements, now, and not raging exclamations, or questions, at least.
I’m disappointed in myself. My spine might have turned to jelly, my teaching pedagogy might have changed to getting by, status quo, hiding. No one watches me teach. No one coaches me. No one holds me accountable. No one knows any different.
I’m getting lazy. Lazy is a word I’ve adamantly ignored because I feel there is a very incredibly damagingly negative connotation, and it’s usually misused.
Maybe I forgive too easily, maybe I make too many excuses, but I think very, very few people are genuinely LAZY. They are stuck, they are emotionally messy, they are unbelieving that they…
Lately I’ve felt anything but consistent. Ecstatic? Sometimes. Crushed? Sometimes. Exhausted? A lot of times. It’s the end of year three and despite a mostly clean bedroom, despite the kaleidoscope sunlight dancing on my bed, despite long hair and big plans and so many things that push me up today I feel low. I’ve written…
read more »Y’all, this is getting ridiculous. Again, I find myself in the Broadway Starbucks of Little Rock. Thinking about what life this summer could look like if I lived here, thinking about how I can lift myself up, thinking about the world at large and how we operate within it. I have a journal open in…
read more »Recent events: I finished my second grad class of my master’s in ed leadership, a finance class. Glory be. I enjoyed it, but this on-line jazz gets me crazy because I consistently miss deadlines and confuse calendars and don’t check any grades until the very end. One of my classes met their writing goal square…
read more »This morning I woke up in New Orleans, in Leaf’s bed with the tiniest bit of rain outside. I opened my eyes and, after recovering from being slightly disoriented in a new state, consciously thought about how I didn’t feel good. This is spring break, this is 10 degrees warmer than already-warm Arkansas, this is…
read more »“The majority of people won’t go where they’re uncomfortable.” – Dr. Gunter Today was our first day of Professional Development in San Antonio. The trip started yesterday (but feels like it started weeks ago). Our flight was at noon: three TFA-ers (which would become four when the last completed the marathon she ran in the…
read more »This might be real close to the longest I’ve gone without an update. On Sunday I’m boarding an airplane and flying to San Antonio with some of my favorite TFA ladies to attend a LEAD21 conference in San Antonio. We’re the founding females for Arkansas Tech’s “Walton Scholars” program which recruits Arkansas TFA corps members…
read more »Kepler’s is a fairly well known restaurant not just in Greenville, MS but for the wider delta. I’d heard of it more than once, but would not have expected to be sitting alone here on a Friday night, Diet Coke glass and salad plate empty, mapping out the rest of my twenties and updating my…
read more »Life! Balance! Utter aggravation! I haven’t been solidly upset with myself in a while, which might be a bad sign. I’ve been told, relatively often (especially since joining TFA), that I have a pretty good handle on being reflective. Self-awareness, self-criticism, self-analysis, self-obsessed, maybe. I try to stay humble, but a girl’s got to acknowledge…
read more »I’ve been mean lately. I come to school and my homeroom asks, “Are you going to be mean today?” and I say, “Raise your hand.” Been really perfecting the totally condescending teacher stare, been really hammering expectations, been really tolerating zero mess. Balancing the desperation of purposeful expectations with allowing people to be human is really…
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