¿Verano en Sudamerica?

A couple days ago the ESL teacher at the school I work at told me that she was thinking about visiting her home in Bolivia this summer. She said if she does it she would fly to Peru and then take a bus to Bolivia because flights to Peru are incredibly cheap right now. She told me they are only $300 right now, and I, being a generally skepticle person said I thought that would be amazing if it were true but that I would have to see for myself before I accepted that round trip flights to Peru were really that cheap. I looked it up that day and to my great surprise she was right. Flights are around $300 and after taxes the round trip flights from DC to Lima and back are under $400! Michelle and I were trying to decide what we should do with our summers off from teaching. We could make a few extra bucks teaching summer school, or we could utilize these summers before we have kids while we are both still working and go on some extended once in a lifetime vacations. We most likely wont be teachers forever and thus we feel we should make the most out of these two years tht we get two month long paid vacations each summer. We were really on the fenec about what to do until we learned how cheap it is to go to Peru. I have no idea why it is so cheap to fly to Peru. Quito, Bunos Aires, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, and everywhere else I looked are all at least twice as much. I honestly wouldn't be able to explan it but it is true. We would love to tour some other countries besides Peru and fly home from another country but even just a return flight from another country is much more expensive. We are still thinking about it, spending a couple weeks making sure we make the right decisino and not rush into anything (as we did last year and were very forutnate to get refunds on plane tickets to Peru). We would probably go for a month or maybe even 5 weeks and try to at least visit some of the other surrounding countries. Since we would have plenty of time we would be able to save boat loads of money on transportation throughout South America by taking the bus instead of flying. I served my mission in peru and am pretty familiar with how much it costs to fly versus take a bus to different regions. It costs a couple hundred bucks to fly from Lima to Cusco but only a small fraction of that to take a bus. You lose a day on the bus but if time is not an issue you don't have to worry about it. The bus rides in and of themselves are scenic and you get to stop at some neat places. Bolivia is close enough to not have to fly to, but I am not sure about Chile and Ecuador. Wherever we went we would have to make sure we were back in Lima to fly home though. So we have a lot to consider, this would be a kind of big deal and you can't really change your mind. Pay off student loans or spend a summer in South America?

Halloween in Alexandria

Yesterday was the most fun Halloween I can remember since when I used to go trick or treating, which when you are a kid is basically the most amazing thing in the world (free candy!). We started off Halloween by going to our ward's Halloween activity because we are part of the activities committee. There was a chili cook off and lots and lots of other good food! Michelle and I helped man the station for little kids to make ghost suckers (blow pops with a tissue wrapped around it a scary face drawn on it). Oh and I should mention that Michelle and I were crayons (non toxic ones of course) for Halloween. We got the idea from a website online for easy costumes. After the ward activity we went to a really fun party that some friends of ours from the ward put together. They organized games and lots of great food there too! Michelle and I were on the winning team in a scavenger hunt/survivor/fear factor type of game that was a lot of fun. Michelle and I were the last leg of our eight man team and we brought home victory by popping all the red balloons and forming the word 'skeleton' with the letters in all the balloons. We were awarded a gift certificate to five guys! Also, the award for funniest costume was awarded to a girl who came as Nadya Suleman ( better known as Octomom). It really was hilarious, she had those big red wax lips, a wig of long black hair, and carried a bunch of cabbage patch kids around in a blanket or in her shirt or something. She deserved the prize. Also funny is that her husband came as a TMZ paparazzi. She is easy to spot in the picture of all the girls.

First Grade Thinking

Here are some funny/cute things the students in my first grade class have said or done this week:

1. Look! I see Old McDonald! (a boy looking out the window of the bus on the way to the pumpkin patch. I think he just saw a farmer. He also told me that he wants to live in the woods.)

2. Look! The bus is driving itself! There's no one there! It's going by itself! (also on the way to the pumpkin patch - we were in the back and the driver was short).

3. A girl in my class used all of her allowance to buy everyone in our class candy for Halloween. She put it all in cute little bags and brought one for each person. She also brought everyone a book (short ones you can print off line). She comes from a very poor and needy family and I was truly humbled to see how unselfish she was even when she herself had so little. I need to follow her example. She is one of the sweetest students in my class.

One of these days I will write about how teaching is going, but for now...back to work!

"Man, my life has changed!"

I read an article this morning online about President Bush giving a motivational speech in Texas and he said he was recently walking his dog and carrying a bag on his hand for scooping up what the dog might leave behind and he realized, "Man my life has changed!" I too have been thinking about how my life has changed over the last few months. It really has changed dramatically in almost every way. Let me try and explain how much and in what ways my life has changed -- improved rather -- from the time Michelle and I lived in Syracuse, NY just a few months ago.

The first aspect is the time I wake up every day. In Syracuse, I had a relatively easy schedule only going to grad school classes. I only had class two days or three days a week almost the entire year; and since I had no job that meant that I stayed up really late and slept in ridiculosuly late most days. Boy oh boy have things changed in terms of what time I wake up! Michelle and I wake up at around 6:15 am each day. That is what time we need to get up to be able to get to get ready, eat breakfast, and travel to the respective school we teach at by 8:00. On Saturdays I usually wake up early to go running, sometimes even earlier than on weekdays. Our church starts at 8:00 am on Sunday so really I don't sleep in past 7 ever. I guess I am, by force, a morning person now. It actually feels great! Getting up early helps me make the most out of every day and be the most productive as I have ever been since my mission probably.

My exercise and eating habbits have also changed dramatically. In syracuse, I reached the most unhealthy and overweight point that I had ever been in my life. Its not rocket science why I got or why anyone else in the world ever gains weight: overeating and lack of exercise. I could go into more detail, but basically for those two simple reasons I put on a lot of weight. I will say one thing about my eating habbits in Syracuse though, just because it is so pathetic it is hillarious. My eating habbits were so bad that around Christmas my diet consisted of home made Christmas cookies and tater tots. 'Nuff said about that! A few months ago though, motivated by the fact that I was going to be the best man at my best friend's wedding, I started to eat right and exercise regularly. This has helped me lose 40 pounds (while gaining muscle so perhaps I have lost even more than 40 pounds of fat) and I think I am in the best shape of my life. I eat tons of fruit and vegetables now and I feel so much better. Michelle can wrap her arms around me easier now too :) I am training for long-distance races and lifting weights a couple days a week so I am really just on a completely different level now than a few months ago when we lived in NY.

My overall schedule and level of business has gone up as well. I work full-time and then take public transportation home (but Michelle picks me up from the Metro so its not too bad taking the metro home) so weekdays are just really busy, plain and simple. I have extra meetings, trainings, and lots of miscellanious little things like phone calls to make for work as well. I am also taking two grad school classes so I have class at American University one night a week and an online class that has assignments due one day a week. I also have professional development trainings one weekend a month. I have to find the time to run and train for my race as well. Our ward is incredible and there are always fun things going on. Add to all this the fact that you could live in DC forever and still not see and do everything that there is to do and see (even though our goal is to see and do everything, lol), there is never not anything exciting to do here. Add church responsibilities to the equation and weekends get pretty busy too.

Hopefulyl in describing how much things have changed I have been able to convey that everything that has changed has been a change for the better and one that has made me happier. We thought and prayed very hard about whether or not we should embark on this adventure to move to DC and do TFA because we knew it would be challenging so it is very humbling and gratifying to know that by doing what we felt was right and following our instincts things have worked out so well! I feel better about myself and I can tell I am so much more productive than I was before. Its kind of the old "the busier you are the more you do" type of thing. I can only imagine how much busier it could be with kids! One of these days Michelle will have to write about how busy she is because her schedule is much more hectic and stresful than mine! She teaches first grade and the planning she has to do for her class is just a totally different creature than what I have to do for teaching Spanish.

Tourists in Our Own City

Michelle and I continue to hit up all the tourist attractions here in DC. I feel like we are tourists in our own city. Our goal is to see and do everything in DC before we leave in a couple years. We have been two more tourist attractions. On our list of unique-to-DC things to do here I think these places would be numbers 6 and 7. The first place is the National Cathedral. What really sparked our interest in visiting the National Cathedral was reading about it in The Lost Symbol. Pretty much everything in the book is true: there is a moonrock in one of the stained glass windows, there are 10 rocks from Mt. Sinai, and they have a gargoyle of Darth Vader. I consider our visit to the National Cathedral one of those pleasant surprises when you don't really know what to expect but really enjoy the experience. It was pretty similar overall to the cathedral in Montreal that we visited earlier this year. The tomb looking picture is where President Woodrow Wilson is buried. His wife, the first and only acting female president, also remains at this cathedral.



The second place to visit is Freedom Plaza. Freedom Plaza is really more of a place that you visit when there is something planned there like a rally or a protest; although you could go there just to walk around and check it out. It is a really long story that deserves its own blog post, but in a nutshell, the union that Michelle and I belong to (you pretty much are automatically members by becoming teachers here in Washington) had a rally on Freedom Plaza to protest a number of things going on right now with the DCPS. I did not necessarily go to full on protest but more to observe and simply show unity with my fellow teachers at my school. It was a very interesting experience and I am glad that I got to participate in a protest that actually involved both me and michelle.

My 1st 7 Weeks of 1st Grade (Again)

It's been a really long time since I've been in first grade, and I have a lot to learn all over again...I have just finished my first 7 weeks of 1st grade. It has been a crazy 7 weeks. I really love teaching first grade. There have been a couple of days where the class is out of control and things aren't going well and I wonder what I got myself into, but most of the time I have a lot of fun. I really do love it! Due to a 40 million dollar budget deficit in D.C. public schools, over 300 teachers were laid off last week. Chad and I feel very blessed and excited to still have our teaching jobs. Because of the layoffs, my class and situation at my school has been changing quite a bit since school started. I started the year with an aid and 13 students. Then I got a different aid, and then a different one. Then I was told to combine my class with the first grade teacher next door. We were going to co-teach a total of 27 students together. That lasted 1 day and then she was told she was going to teach 2nd grade so the next day I had all 27 students by myself (my aid was moved to kindergarten). Then the next day they were split again and I had 20 by myself. Then the next day I had 20 with a co-teacher. I co-taught for about 2 weeks and then my co-teacher was just laid off this past week. So now...it is me teaching 18 students by myself. It has been really crazy with all of the changes and especially hard on the kids, but I think everything should be stable now. 18 is still a pretty good class size and while there are advantages to co-teaching, I think I prefer to do it by myself.

Anyway, like I said, teaching first grade is a lot of fun! The kids are really cute (most of the time) and make me laugh. They are always making me cards and giving me I love you notes. One boy in my class keeps telling me how fun school is which makes me feel good. Here are some highlights from the past couple of weeks:

1. Show 'n tell last Friday: One little boy sang the whole My Girl song to the class and it was the cutest thing ever. Another little boy sang I'm Proud to Be an American - again - so cute. These two boys made my week.
2. We learned about the bald eagle in social studies and now my students point it out everywhere we go on school signs. They really remember what they learned.
3. We learned about living and non-living things a few weeks ago and every time we go outside my class continues to show me what is living and what is not and how they know. It is great to see them continue to use what they have learned.
4. My class is doing really well in reading and math and really progressing. I have seen so much improvement in so many students throughout the 7 weeks!
5. There have been so many great days, cute things said, and fun experiences. I can't think of any right now, but there are always tons! I'll have to post on a more regular basis all of the cute things that happen.
6. I had a formal observation this past week by the vice principal and she said my lesson was exemplary and she was very proud! Yeah! (It's a good thing she didn't see my math lessson that day!)

Right now the big challenges are the behavior of 2 of my students who are out of control. They are slowly getting better, but really have problems. The next big challenge is the time commitment. I work about 70-80 hours a week planning lessons, grading papers, calling parents...Sometimes it gets really overwhelming, but Chad has been very supportive and helpful and is doing a great job keeping me sain! I had no idea how much work and energy it takes to be a teacher. I am truly grateful for all of my teachers and their hard work. I had no idea what it took. There are so many things to keep track of - grades for 6 different subjects, attendance, uniforms, behavior, contact with parents, who turns in what, who completes which centers, assessments...I have always considered myself a really organized person, but wow - I can't seem to get organized anymore!! The 3rd challenge is that my students cannot read, so it takes a lot of thought to figure out how to give them assignments they can do and especially how to test them. I have to do a lot orally, which takes a lot more time. They can't read directions and I find myself explaining how to do things over and over again. Part of that is my fault too. The 4th challenge is just learning how to break things down simple enough for a first grader to understand. Sometimes I think I am presenting something in the most basic way possible, but then I realize it still needs to be broken down more. I am still learning what a 1st grader is capable of and still practicing how to bring things down to their level.

Overall, I love teaching first grade and it is not as hard as I thought it would be. Hopefully I can continue to say that and it only gets easier.

Runner's Rite of Passage

As I mentioned before, I signed up for a half marathon and the training I have been going through has been a huge part of me getting into shape and losing a lot of weight. Just for the record, I have lost (as of this morning) 40 pounds since I started running and eating right two and a half months ago. In the research and reading I have done about how to train for longer races I have noticed that a lot of people refer to a 'rite of passage' that every runner must go through, and that rite of passage is to run a 10 mile run. I fulfilled that rite of passage today. It was hard but it felt good to get through it. It was 2 miles further than I ran last Saturday, which is a little bit more of an increase to your 'long run' than is recommended but I knew that if I ran 9 miles I would not be able to stop there and would just want to do 10, so I just decided to do 10 miles today. There are some amazing running trails here is DC. Today I ran along the Potomac River here in VA and crossed over into DC at some point and then turned around and ran back. It is nice to see the beauty of this city as I run (it is way better than the treadmill). I could see the river and lots of trees most of the time, and across the river I could see the Washington Monument and the US Capitol. My half marathon is 36 days, so I still have a lot of training left to do to reach my goal, but I feel I am well on my way.

Cool Things to do in DC #5: National Zoo

Michelle and I have continued to visit the neat fun things here in DC and this week we went to the National Zoo. There are so many places we want to visit that we are starting to make a list; things I recently added were the US Botanical Garden and the National Cathedral (I got the idea to visit these because both were in the new Dan Brown book that we are reading). The zoo is part of the Smithsonian series of museums and research facilities so you know it is going to be a legitimate zoo. Also I should that the National Zoo, like so many other cool places to go around here, is free. We saw elephants, a hippo, all kinds of unique birds, lots of other animals. Also as a side note, Michelle and I last visited this zoo in the spring of 2007 while we were interns out here in DC. We saw better animals this time but it was essentially the same.

Happy Birthday Michelle!

I want to wish a happy birthday to Michelle! She turned 23 today. She is the girl of my dreams and she makes me a better person. Michelle has made so many sacrifices in the short time we have been married to help support our family. I am grateful that she is such a selfless person. Now she is a first grade teacher in DCPS and cares about her kids so much, she is truly an example to me everyday! I am the luckiest man alive. Happy birthday Michelle!

Weight Loss

For the past two months, starting when Michelle and I lived in Philadelphia, I have been making a tremendous effort to eat healthy and exercise a lot. I am pleased to say that as of this morning I have lost 35 pounds from when I started. I think I am just about where I was when we got married. I am currently training for a half marathon in early November. I am working hard to be ready for it and I love how much weight it is helping me lose.

Cool Things to do in DC #1-4

When Michelle and I were getting ready to move to DC, we thought about all the things that there are to do in this huge and diverse city. Michelle and I both lived in DC for 4 months while we were interns on Capitol Hill back in 2007 so we had a good idea of what it is like to live here and all of the things there are to do. DC is like other big cities (philadelphia, NYC, etc) in some ways but really I feel it is a lot different. One of the biggest differences in comparing DC to other big cities is that there is so much to do in DC that is FREE! Really there is no reason for anyone to ever be bored here. There are more museums, monuments, concerts (of all types of music), plays, performances, political events, tours, sporting events (DC has pro teams for all the sports...sometimes multiple teams, ie-the orioles and Nats or the redskins and the ravens) and parks then you could ever possibly visit really in any amount of time. The reason why a lot of the stuff to do here is free (like the zoo, most museums, the Smithsonians, etc) is because they are funded by you and me, the taxpayer. Michelle and I know our time here in DC is probably somewhat limited to just a couple of years and after that we may not live here again so we have decided to make the very most of our time and try and do and see as much as humanly possible while we are living here. Having said that, we want to make a list of all the cool things there are to do in DC that are unique to this area. Today I will share the first four things we have done in the city that are unique to here. Hopefully by the end of our two years here it will be a very long list.

Cool thing #1: Washington DC Temple
We went with our good friends the Kachers to the Temple here in DC our very first night after moving here. It is a breathtakingly gorgeous temple. They refer to it on the radio here as "The Mormon Temple" when they are describing traffic and stuff like that on the freeways because you can see the beautiful temple when you are driving on the freeway. It literally takes your breath away when you see it. This was my first time getting to go inside.


Cool thing #2: Arlington National Cemetery
Michelle's parents and sister were here a couple weeks ago and I thought they should see the Arlington National Cemetery. It doesn't sound like it would be an exciting tourist type of place but it is really amazing. It is really a scared place I feel. Thousands and thousands of soldiers are buried there from all different wars throughout the US's history. JFK and his family are there too. It is quite a sight to see all the graves perfectly lined up for as far as the eye can see. The highlight without a doubt though is the changing of the guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier. It is a powerful thing to watch.




Cool thing #3: The Washington Nationals games
DC has its own MLB team: the Nationals. They are by far the worst team (according to their record anyway) in the country but it is still whole lot of fun to go to their games. Because they are so bad and demand for their tickets is so low, you can actually get into the game for $5. That is remarkably cheap. I paid like $40 or something to go to a Red Sox game in Boston earlier this year just to give you a comparison. The Nationals games have a great atmosphere and it really is a lot of fun just to be there.





Cool Thing #4: George Washington Masonic Temple
Michelle and I recently visited the George Washington Masonic Temple. We came here before when we used to live here but we wanted to come visit again because we found it very fascinating. The tour guide is very informative and answers any question you have. He said that he wanted to dispell any and all rumors out there because he knows Dan Brown has a new book coming out this week that will have a lot to do with the Masons. It is really interesting to hear about the role Free Masonry had in our Founding Fathers' lives and the values that the organization promotes. As the name of the museum denotes, it is mostly focused on George Washington and his life as a Mason leader. There are lots of cool paintings and artifacts from his life.

Long Overdue Update

Life has been so incredibly busy and so much has been going on that it was both hard to find the time to write on the blog and hard to know just what to blog about. So, sorry for not writing for two months. I suppose I will cover a little bit of everything. Michelle and I survived our Teach For America training in Philadelphia. It was the most intense 5 weeks of our lives. We averaged 5 or 6 hours of sleep on week days and that was because we had our lives prioritized a little bit differently than other people there. Lots of people were pulling all nighters left and right, we just cared too much about being able to spend time with each other and getting some sleep to do things like that. We planned lessons, went to workshops, taught summer school during the day, and squeezed in as much sight seeing as we could. We got to be in Phily for the 4th of July so that was cool. All in all it was great living in Phily for that little while. I am glad we don't live there now but it was nice to get to know that city a little bit. We lived in dorms at Temple University and had all you can eat meals at their cafeteria. And everyhting was paid for by TFA so it kind of felt like a vacation...a vacation that you had to work harder than you knew was posisble on. We moved to DC the last day in July. There was a bit of a situation with our apartment that we moved in to (I could write an entire blog dedicated to what happened) at first but the management of our apartment copmlex is phenomenal and paid for us to stay in a hotel while they prepared a bigger and better apartment for us at the price of our old one. To make a long story short, our management made up for a bad situation by giving us money, a bigger apartment, and just being really cool. We love where we live. We live in Alexandria VA, just outside of DC. We wanted to be able to drive places and not pay for parking everywhere we went to so we decided not to live in the actual district of columbia. Michelle and I both love our jobs teaching. I am the Spanish teacher at a junior high/elementary school. I teach Spanish I to eight graders and do an exposure type of class to the elementary school kids throughout the week. I see each lower grade level one time a week. It is really a lot of fun to get to work with kids of all different ages. I like teaching Spanish and I really love being a teacher. I am so glad that Michelle and I are doing Teach for America. We thought it about it and prayed about it long and hard whether we should do TFA and I am glad we followed our feelings and instinct and decided to do it. It feels so right to be out here, we both love our jobs, our ward and all the friends we have made here are amazing, and everything just seems to be going well. The one thing I could do without is the traffic on the way home from work, but I guess I can deal with that. Michelle is a first grade teacher. She loves her job also. She is much busier than I am because she has to prepare everything for her entire class everyday. I on the other hand only have to prepare one lesson for the day and I have enough planning time to just do it at school. I really have a great situation. Michelle likes what she does though and its worth the time and effort she puts into it. Everyday she comes home with cute stories of the things he kids do and say. Being a teacher is a very rewarding job. I have a picture that a third grader drew for me that says "You are cool." He is a Latino student that I have been helping because he is an ESL student (English as a second language) and is a little behind. It is really just a great job. I am excited to get to do this for the next couple years or maybe longer, you never know. Changing topics entirely, we love living in DC. There is so much to do and see. We want to do everything by the time we leave here in a couple years. Our ward does so many fun things together and we have made lots of friends. We have done some unique things to DC already as well. We have gone to Arlington National Cementary, a Nationals game, visited some mouments, visited the DC temple and things like that. We are hoping that our friends that live in other places will want to come visit us and stay at our apartment. If anybody wants to come, we have got an extra bed room for you! I will have to write a more in depth blog one of these days just on our apartment or our jobs or what we do for fun out here, because there really is so much that I have to say, but this is going to wrap up my blogging for now. This is my first blog since I decided to start blogging again, so this is good for now. Michelle is barbecuing some chicken on our new BBQ and it smells really good, so i'm outta here!

Teach for America Institute Weeks 1-4

For the past 4 weeks Chad and I have been in Philadelphia doing a very intense 5 week training program to teach us how to be teachers (we will be teachers in Washington D.C. for two years starting in the fall - see previous post). It has been the hardest thing by far that either of us has ever done. It has been very mentally, emotionally, and physically draining, especially the first part. We get up every morning by 5:30 a.m., quickly get ready to go, and then walk to the dining hall to get breakfast and make sack lunches. Then we get on the buses by 6:45 to go to our different schools. Chad is a high school Spanish teacher for the summer and I am a 4th grade teacher, so we go to different schools. We stay at our schools until 4:30 every day. At school, we each have a class that we teach with 1 or 2 other people. I have 2 other teachers in my group and the 3 of us rotate weekly teaching reading, writing, and math. Chad just teaches 1 hour of Spanish every day. Other than the hour or two when we are actually teaching our students, we are in back to back classes learning how to be teachers: manage classrooms, communicate with families, plan and execute lessons...We get home from school around 5:00 and go to the dining hall to eat dinner. Then we come back to the dorms and type up lesson plans, investment and classroom management plans, make copies, get supplies ready for the next day, finalize the next day's lesson plans... for the next 5 hours. We also sometimes have classes that we have to go to at night. We have absolutely no time to do anything other than teaching stuff all week long. We do have the weekends where we have a little bit of our own time, but we usually have to plan a lot on the weekend as well. It's been very tiring. The first 2 weeks we were getting about 4-5 hours of sleep a night. Teach for America has this program calculated very strategically to push you to your breaking point, but not quite over it (actually, a lot of people have quit, so I guess they didn't figure out everyone's breaking point). This is definitely not a sustainable life style, but we only have one week left so we can do it. As we have gotten better at learning how to plan lessons and manage our time we have been able to get to sleep earlier and things have gotten a little easier. This week has been a lot better and we have found time to work out and even relax (a little). It is still a lot of stress and pressure though to write and teach really good lessons. I think sometimes Teach for America forgets that as of today I have only taught in a classroom for 19 hours - that's about 4 days worth.

As hard as this is, we are both really enjoying teaching and we are learning a ton! My favorite part of the day is when I am teaching my students. There are 10 students in my 4th grade class. There are some behavioral problems, but for the most part they are pretty well behaved and classroom management has gone well. I love to teach them and see how excited they get when they learn how to do something. They all really want to learn. They are already progressing a lot. One of the big struggles I do have with them is building their confidence in themselves. The majority of them are in my class because they failed a subject in 4th grade and now they think they can't do it, but I know that they can if they work hard. They are all very bright. Sometimes it is frustrating and stressful when they are not understanding something and I can't figure out how to teach it differently so that they do understand and do well. If they are not understanding, it is my fault.

Here's some highlights from the first 4 week:

• They took a math test last week and then took the same one again this week and improved the class average by 20%.
  
• A girl in my class got a 0% on that same math test last week and 100% this week. Another student got a 25% and then a 75%
• One student wants so badly to learn and come to school that one morning she told me she almost couldn't make it because her mom wouldn't wake up, but then she kept splashing water on her face until she did wake up so her mom could take her to school. It's exciting to me to see her take so much initiative and have such a strong desire to do what she needs to do to get to school.
• The first week I taught reading and spelling and everyone in my class (except 1 student) got 100% on the spelling test. The girl that didn't get 100 doesn't know English well and hasn't learned to write at all. However, she did get 4 correct and even understood the difference between short and long a.
• My class has started to ask me to help them with math at lunch and before school and they have wanted me to read to them at lunch also. They are getting excited about what they are learning and really want to work hard.
• There is a student in my class who has hard a really hard time focusing and staying awake. It was a big struggle for the first 3 weeks, but this past week we came up with an individualized behavior plan for him and he is doing so much better and focusing almost all day long!
• My whole class got their "behavior clips" up to super superstar status yesterday and we did not have to give even 1 kid a warning.

Anyway, the past 4 weeks have been incredibly hard and stressful, but fun and rewarding as well. I hope that next week when we do all of the testing that my class is able to meet the goals we have set for each of them in reading, writing, and math.

Updates - Finally!

TEACH FOR AMERICA: NEW JOBS
This past February Chad and I applied for a program called Teach for America. It is an organization through Americorps that sends students with bachelor’s degrees who have excelled in academic and leadership areas to teach in low-income, under achieving, inner-city schools for two years. The goal of the program is to end educational inequality and make it possible for all children some day to have an excellent education. It was a pretty extensive application process. We had to write a letter of intent, resume, and essays and send our transcripts in. After we made it past the first stage we went to a day long interview where we had to teach a group a 5 minute test, participate in role plays and group discussions, take some written tests, and do an hour long personal interview. It took a lot of work to get this far and prepare for everything. In May we found out we were accepted into the program and placed in Las Vegas, NV. Unfortunately, there was training for teachers going to the Las Vegas area that started on June 24 (we did not know about this training when applying). Chad’s last day of school was June 25. His school would not let him leave even a day early and Las Vegas would not let us come late to the training (which was really just an introduction to the program and some classes that weren’t a big deal). Anyway, we decided to request to be transferred to another region where either the training started later or we would be able to get there late. A couple of weeks later we received an e-mail that we were transferred to Washington D.C. where induction (the training) started June 22 – still a date we could not attend. We called a few program directors for the area to see if we could come late and they said we absolutely could not. Again, Chad asked his school if he could leave early and they said absolutely not. After many attempts to find a compromise, it was just not possible and we had to turn down the offer to join the program. We were pretty disappointed, but at least we had tried everything. Chad just continued to look for a different job and we put Teach for America behind us. Then at the very beginning of June we got an e-mail asking us if we would like our offer back for D.C. It said we could come to induction late if we were willing to pay emergency fees to take the required certification tests late and get everything else done in the little over 3 weeks we had before we needed to be in D.C. After a lot of discussion and prayer, we decided it was the right thing to do and we got really excited. We had looked into Teach for America pretty thoroughly and we knew it would be a huge challenge and would probably be the hardest thing we have evern done, but we felt like it was right and we wanted to do it. Thus began a very crazy next 3 weeks with getting fingerprinting done, taking two certification (Praxis) tests (one in New Hampshire), filling out lots of paperwork, preparing to move, working, finishing grad work…all in the midst of hitting a deer and totaling our car (see previous posts). We are now doing training in Philadelphia (more about that later) and will then move to the D.C. in August.

CHAD’S PARENTS COME TO VISIT
Chad’s parents came to visit and help us move during our last week in Syracuse. We were so grateful for their help and had a lot of fun with them! Here are some highlights from their visit:

We all went to a Syracuse Skychiefs Game (minor league baseball) where I was chosen to compete in an ugly duckling contest (I don't know how I'm supposed to take that. lol.) I had to go out on the field and put on these flippers that were bent down in the front and a beak on my nose and race another girl to put a certain number of ducks in swimming pools. She started out winning, but then I was catching up and probably would have beat her, but on the last duck I lost my balance because of the flippers and missed grabbing the duck out of the pool on my first try, so she won. Too bad, but it was fun.


We also went to Lake Ontario, one of the great lakes, and walked around a little and took some pictures. It's huge! It looks like the ocean!

Syracuse's Dinosuar BBQ was recently voted the best BBQ restaurant in the United States, so we all went to dinner there one night. It was very good!

Baseball Hall of Fame

Baseball Hall of Fame

We went to get icecream at the most popular homemade icecream place in Syracuse - Gannon's.

We had a yummy dinner the first night Chad's parents arrived.