A Phenomenal Poem.

When I went to the library to pick out Maya Angelou's memoir, I noticed a collection of her poetry sitting next to it on the shelf. Being myself, I naturally checked that one out as well. This afternoon, waiting for students to arrive for my classes, I flipped through its pages, reading this verse or that, losing myself in the rhythm of her voice.

I love poetry. There is something beautiful and monumentous about riding the ebbs and flows of language and cadence. I need to read poetry more often: this I realize every time I do immerse myself in verse. Sigh. And let it be.

Anyway, here's a poem from Maya that I - and the friends I read it aloud to this evening - absolutely adore. And I dedicate its posting to all the phenomenal women in my life...

"Phenomenal Woman"

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.

I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size

But when I start to tell them,

They think I'm telling lies.

I say,

It's in the reach of my arms,

The span of my hips,

The stride of my step,

The curl of my lips.

I'm a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That's me.

I walk into a room

Just as cool as you please,

And to a man,

The fellows stand or

Fall down on their knees.

Then they swarm around me,

A hive of honey bees.

I say,

It's the fire in my eyes,

And the flash of my teeth,

The swing in my waist,

And the joy in my feet.

I'm a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That's me.

Men themselves have wondered

What they see in me.

They try so much

But they can't touch

My inner mystery.

When I try to show them

They say they still can't see.

I say,

It's in the arch of my back,

The sun of my smile,

The ride of my breasts,

The grace of my style.

I'm a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That's me.

Now you understand

Just why my head's not bowed.

I don't shout or jump about

Or have to talk real loud.

When you see me passing

It ought to make you proud.

I say,

It's in the click of my heels,

The bend of my hair,

The palm of my hand,

The need for my care.

'Cause I'm a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That's me.

Life Reflected.

I have just finished reading Maya Angelou's memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. A teacher friend and I chose it as the first book for our recently started book club. It's taken me a few weeks to get through, but I have thoroughly enjoyed this book and the reflections it has elicited.

I first "discovered" memoirs a few years ago. I credit a mentor of mine, a wise and reflective woman, with that introduction. I quickly fell in love with the honest stories and the reflective wisdom which caresses my own poetic nature. Still today, there is something refreshing about slipping into someone else's story, listening to someone else's thoughts, and reflecting on the intersections of our distinct lives. It is a type of writing, a type of thinking, which comes naturally when my mind is calm and at peace.

It's a balance, this writing style, between telling a story from the past and reflecting on it in the future. Mixing the honesty of the experience once lived through with the meaning realized in hind sight. An art form, really.

Let me share with you, here, a passage I particularly enjoyed from Maya Angelou's work:

"My education and that of my Black associates were quite different from the education of our white schoolmates. In the classroom we all learned past participles, but in the streets and in our homes the Blacks learned to drop s's from plurals and suffixes from past-tense verbs. We were alert to the gap separating the written word from the colloquial. We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with 'That's not unusual.' But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said, 'It be's like that sometimes.'"

Pencils.

I decided today that pencils are my favorite renewable resource. (Well, or at least a close second to water...).

I'm a teacher.

I had a parent ask me a question today that I was used to fielding in Uganda (with this exact phrasing) but haven't dealt with so much in the US:

"Are you a teacher by profession?"

My response today, as it almost always is, was affirmative: "Yes."

Today's parent followed up with encouragement: "I can tell. You're very good at it." (A blessed confidence booster after a crazy afternoon of traffic that resulted in me reaching my teaching site ten minutes before that class started - so glad I didn't procrastinate this week's prep!)

I don't have a degree in Education (yet). I don't hold a teaching certificate. But I do have a decent amount of training in teacherly type things (and plenty of it specific to the work that I'm doing now) and a fair amount of experience.

I am a teacher by vocation - and, at least currently - by profession.

And, as a teacher, pencils are essential to my line of work. Other writing utensils can be useful, but even with my adult students, there are times when a good sharp pencil - with an easily rubbable eraser - is just a basic necessity.

Because I often require students to write with pencils (or at all), I have a bag of them that I bring to every class. Three weeks into this teaching term, I've seen a fair number of my pencils walk away. Or, perhaps I should say, I haven't seen them: students or their parents have (usually accidentally) walked away with them.

Given the frequency with which I lose pencils, one might expect my supply to be rapidly dwindling. This is not, however, the case.

Enter today's grand realization: Pencils are a fabulous renewable resource.

What do I mean?

Only this: as quickly as I lose pencils, I seem also to be gaining them. And some of the ones I've come away with are more fun than the ones I started with. For example, although I originally filled my bag with plain yellow #2 pencils, today's assessment notes were taken with a lovely white and green "Happy Halloween" pencil.

It might bother me that so many of my pencils tend to find new homes so easily - if not for the fact that I keep coming away with others to replace them.

Like I said, a fabulous renewable resource.

thirty two.

Saturday marked the turning of an era, or at least the reaching of an annual milestone, in my boyfriend's life. Twenty six years previous, his mother, bless her soul, had borne him into this world, no doubt hoping for a well-behaved easygoing son: the kind who seems a blessing and a delight every single moment.

Twenty six years later, it is no small matter to celebrate his continued existence, particularly given his propensity for semi-harrowing adventure and fondness for that which can be made to explode. And so, celebrate we did!

One of his favorite foods (quite possibly his most favorite in the whole entire world) is blueberries. Coincidentally, blueberry season in this region of the continent tends to begin in mid to late June and extend a good way into July. (Head up to New York if you want to find blueberries in August.)

Be not surprised, therefore, dear readers, to hear that I spent a good chunk of time last week researching and calling farms which purported to host pick your own blueberries. Eventually, I settled on "Fred + III," a family-owned and interestingly named patch located in Pemberton, New Jersey. When I called Fred on Friday afternoon, he assured me that his blueberries were in season and ready for picking, despite the catastrophic thunder storm which had swept through our region the day before.

So, plans were made: to depart early on Saturday morning, to bring along some other Molecular Bio-type friends, to take our largest empty tupperware containers, to pick fabulous lovely sweet blueberries. Saturday morning dawned bright and beautiful; as soon as the friends arrived, we were off on our adventure, heading east toward the excitement which awaited us.

We found Fred's place easily enough; he turned out to be quite a sweet and helpful old codger. Despite never having picked their own fruit before, our friends took to it fairly quickly. The bushes were so hung with berries that two of us could work down the same row and barely seem to make a dent: Fred has an abundant crop this year! Before long, we had each filled a can, then another, each holding four pounds.

By the time we called it quits, dustier and slightly browner than when we arrived, the four of us had picked thirteen cans worth of berries. At $1.25 per pound, significantly less than any fresh fruit available in the city, how could we not take advantage of this opportunity?

Our friends took home their share, leaving us with the thirty two (yes, 32) pounds of blueberries we bought from Fred that morning. All of Saturday afternoon was spent sorting and preserving these delicacies. Our freezer and fridge were feeling quite hospitable, and I haven't gone many hours without eating blueberries since waking up on Saturday morning.

Thirty two pounds worth of blueberries should provide an abundance of blueberry-enhanced dishes: muffins, pie, cobbler, jam, coffee cake, smoothies, just to name a few. We want to try some more exotic recipes: cold blueberry soup amongst them.

Mostly, though, those thirty two pounds hold out the simple promise of a sweet blue winter. If you come to visit, you might just get a warm muffin...

Out My Window

I'm sitting at my desk drinking a "made from scratch" blueberry oj coconut rum smoothie, greatly appreciative for the cool breeze created by a fan set on high. My computer sits in front of the pile of books I'll be teaching from this week; lesson plans, assessment sheets, and an abundant supply of colored markers spill across the remainder of the black faux wood.

My desk is tucked into a corner of our front room: the left corner, where I sit now, backs up against one of our street-side windows. As I sat down to write this evening, intending to blog about this or that story from my life, I thought of a prompt I once heard from a friend: to write about what one sees out one's window everyday. Over the past year, as I've transitioned from place to place to yet another place, I've often reflected on the events, people, and images framed by my windows.

Now, as I once again settle in, with no intentions to leave on the near horizon, I catch myself contemplating this window - and what I see through its screen (for it's far too muggy to keep our windows closed).

We live on a quiet street, Buckingham Place, a home for royalty if one slips an extra vowel. Tucked between 44th and 45th, one-way traffic only, it's all of one block long. The kind of street that you likely only know exists if you live here, or know someone who lives here, or just like to walk around West Philly and discover all the hidden streets. The kind of street that doesn't cater to emergency vehicles or public transportation or any kind of acceleration.

There is a tree directly out my window and electrical lines strung with sneakers. One of these days, I'll probably have something very important to procrastinate: those shoes must eventually be counted (or perhaps photographed). Through the branches and leaves, the other side of the street looms, every house the same as ours - and yet, not. Built identical, the buildings are now old and each much proud of its own particular character. Each has a front porch; this is the kind of street where people sit on their porches, have parties on their porches, keep strange statues on their porches, even philosophize on their porches. I don't know most of my neighbors, but I am acquainted with the homeless man who does know all of them, and who often sleeps on one or another porch.

My boyfriend calls it a hippie street - and then tells me that I fit in perfectly. Something about my flowing skirts and eccentric jewelry: we live on a street where drummers and landscapers and writers all seem to sip from the fount of creativity. Some nights there enters through my window a cool breeze, a twist of melody, the murmur of lives lived.

Through my window, I glimpse my life.

OMM!

Compliments of a rising first grader in one of my classes today, my new favorite exclamation: "Oh my mother!"

Now, I tend to find it humorous when four and five year olds exclaim, "Oh my goodness!" (even more so if it doesn't fit the context...). But "Oh my mother!"? I must admit that, despite the fact that my younger friends tease me about being "old," my twenty four and a half years of existence had never blessed me with this lovely phrasing.

So, here's the context:

We read two books in the first week's lesson for the rising first grade class: Morris the Moose (the virtues of which I clearly outlined in a previous post!) and We're Going on a Bear Hunt. The former book gives my students a chance to practice reading on their own, with support from whatever adult is attending the class with them. The latter, however, I have the pleasure of reading aloud to the group, and then, right at the end of the class time, acting out.

This week's dramatization was grand: eleven bear hunters and I marched around the room, swishing through tall grass, stumbling through a dark and gloomy forest, and tiptoeing into a scary cave! Of course, once we found the bear in his cave, we hightailed it back home - and under the covers - and declared our bear hunt over. Admittedly, some of my more, shall we say, excitable young gentlemen wanted to continue "hunting," but I sent them home instead.

Even before we began the dramatization however, a very small - and usually shy - young lady made my day! It was during my first reading of the story, which I may have dramatized a bit myself. The bear hunting family had swished through the tall grass, squished to the other side of the oozy mud, and even splashed across a river. But then, they happened upon a "swirling, whirling snowstorm". And, as one of my students had so wisely pointed out earlier, they weren't wearing coats: "The baby is even in her jammies!"

At this point, from the front row, totally out of the blue, a small voice exclaimed, "Oh my mother!"

And I tried not to giggle too much as I shivered my way through the howling wind and swirling snow.

Not once, but...

thrice!

That's right: this is the third new post on my blog this evening.

It's high time this writing hiatus comes to an end, and what better way to commence a new period of public reflection than by sharing stories from my new classrooms.

So, to those of you who've waited out this silent period with me, thanks for sticking around.

And no, despite my boyfriend's fears, the sky doesn't appear to be falling tonight. Do be expecting me to blog more frequently again, though.

Silly Morris!

One of the books I teach in my class for entering first graders is Morris the Moose, by B. Wiseman. It's a fun beginning reader story about a moose (named Morris) who meets a cow and thinks she's a moose. As Morris points out throughout the story, she has "four legs and a tail and things on her head" so she is obviously a moose. The cow spends a few pages trying to convince Morris otherwise. Eventually they seek the help of first a deer and then a horse, neither of which are any help, as they both just think that everyone else is the same kind of animal as themselves. I'll leave you in suspense as to how they eventually resolve Morris' "moose-take" - you'll have to read it for yourselves!

After reading it aloud to my class the first time, then having my students practice reading themselves, with support from their parents, one of the questions I asked was this: "If you were the cow, what would you have said to make Morris believe that you weren't a moose?"

Some of their answers were fairly straightforward, things I would have thought of myself:

"I would tell him that the things on my head are different from the things on his head!"

"He should look at the cow's body and see that they're not the same."

"They should look at the feet. The cow has different feet than Morris."

My favorite response, though, was a bit more direct:

"The cow should just tell Morris to be HONEST!"

Said with just that much emphasis.

Yeah, I think that might take care of the matter!

So many books... so little time.

I used to have a t-shirt with the title phrase on it. A gift from someone who knew me well in my adolescence. For as long as I can remember, I've loved reading. To find me without a book, especially during my elementary and middle school daily bus riding career, would have a ridiculously improbable expectation. There were points, perhaps around 5th and 6th grade, when I had to have at least two books in my backpack at all times -- because I would read, on average, about a book a day. Then I started to discover thicker books, with pages numbering in the upper hundreds: those might sometimes take a few days. Suffice it to say, my love for reading was instilled - and nurtured - from a very young age.

Given this fact, it should not surprise you that I am absolutely positively thrilled about my summer job!

What is this amazing assignment, you might ask?

Well, let me tell you about it :)

About a month ago, I was hired by the Institute of Reading Development to teach - wait for it! - summer reading enrichment classes. I've spent most of the last month studying curriculum, reading fantastic pieces of juvenile literature, and preparing to teach. Most of it was "distance training," which involved a lot of individualized study and long conference calls.

Training ended a week ago, though, and the first term of the summer program started on Saturday. I had my first set of classes yesterday at the University of Delaware. First graders in the morning, then fourth & fifth graders in the early afternoon, and middle schoolers for my last group. I came home exhausted, but I had a great time. [And though some of you might think I'm crazy, I still hold that my favorite age group to work with is that slightly reluctant middle school range.]

One day, three (out of eight that I will teach) levels taught, one long check-in with my supervisor, and one phone call to a frustrated parent into the term, I am still absolutely thrilled about this job. I mean, how couldn't I be?

I'm back in a classroom, which I'm realizing more and more is exactly where I belong. I'm teaching reading, which is something I personally love. I get to work through great books - Fellowship of the Ring, Banner in the Sky, Henry Huggins, Cricket in Times Square, The Stories Julian Tells, Where the Wild Things Are, just to name a few - with kids who really identify with the characters and connect with the story. I really like my supervisor, and I've got a great curriculum to work from. I'll be teaching across a variety of levels - my eleven classes range from preschoolers all the way up to adult professionals. I'm adding some new skills - reading level assessment and speed reading techniques - to my repertoire. And, starting tomorrow, I get to spend half of every week (for the next five) in Mechanicsburg, teaching classes only a few miles away from my alma mater.

Speaking of Mechanicsburg, I'm headed that way tomorrow. Seven (large) boxes of books and other materials are packed and sitting by my apartment door, waiting to be loaded into my car tomorrow morning. My lesson plans and teaching materials are piled up on my desk, about to slide into my backpack. My books are studied, notes written, and I'm excited about meeting a brand new set of students and parents.

[For any of you that might be interested: these are reading enrichment classes, and enrollment is still open. Visit http://readingprograms.org/ and type in your home zip code to learn more. And if you're in the Mechanicsburg/Grantham/Harrisburg area, know that I'd love to see you [my adult class has lots of empty space] or your child(ren) in one of my classes!]

I'm getting paid to teach reading. I've pinched myself, but I keep waking up and finding this to still be true. In case you hadn't noticed, I'm absolutely excited about this :)

A Minimal Update

Copied directly from an email I wrote this morning, here is some news that I would typically have shared on Facebook - but I recently deleted my account - or reflected at length on here - but I've been exhaustingly busy of late and thus neglecting the writerly side of my self. Hopefully that will change soon. But for now, here's a bit of news:

First, I have a summer job. I'll be working as a Reading Teacher for a program called the Institute of Reading Development. I'll be teaching reading enrichment classes from preschool all the way through adults in Philadelphia and the surrounding region. I'm in the midst of training for this position right now and am greatly excited. This job will begin June 19th and continue until August 30th.

Second, I learned yesterday evening that I have been accepted into a Master's of Education program at the University of Pennsylvania, to start this fall if I accept. The program is in the Language and Literacy division of the Graduate School of Education, and would be in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. You probably won't be too surprised to hear that I'm pretty excited about this possibility and am currently trying to figure out if I can afford it (I've been offered a partial tuition scholarship and a graduate assistantship which would certainly help offset some of the cost).

And third, because I've been so awful at keeping in touch with some of you, just wanted to let you know that I'm in the process of moving up to Philadelphia. If you desire my new mailing address, please let me know.