One Wild and Precious Life

 First post of 2024!  In my last post, I mentioned how I had been thinking a lot about my why .  In the intervening weeks, I've found myself thinking about this experience in a different framework--Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey  (this came up during a zoom with Joyce and I can't get it out of my head!).  For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Joseph Campbell's monomyth model is an often-used framework for writing fiction.  There are several versions of the model, but I'm going to use the 6 stage model.  The 6 stages are: setting forth  (the call), threshold , world of unfamiliar  (road of trials), nadir  (abyss), return threshold , and rebirth/return .  Y'all know I love my Star Wars, and so I could not pass up the opportunity to use Luke Skywalker to illustrate the model.  You'll also know what scene comes to mind in regard to the quote opening this post.  😆   Looking back through my posts, I think I'...

 The end of the year is, for a lot of people, a time of looking back and looking ahead.  This year, I find myself thinking a lot about both--how the last year has been a year of huge change and transition for me and how the year ahead will be shaped by my journey of service.   As I finished up my first term of school and I started thinking about what goals I have for the next term, I was brought back to my why.  BTW: if you haven't read Start with Why , I encourage you to pick it up.    Why  am I doing this?  One of my whys is simply because the call to service was so loud that I couldn't ignore it.  But another why is that I wanted to challenge myself in new ways while giving and sharing of myself.   It's the why   that helps me get through the hard times.  And as I've talked about, this experience has been hard in a lot of ways.  There were certain things that I knew would be hard--and they have been hard...

 I'm a week later than intended with this post, but last Sunday turned out a bit differently than I had expected (more on that below) and I didn't have it in me to sit at the computer and write.  We are approaching the end of the term here and 12/05 will mark 6 months of service for me.  These benchmarks along with thanksgiving, have had me thinking a lot about gratitude.  So today I'd like to share some of the things that I am particularly grateful for.  The opportunity to work with children and see them succeed .  The past couple of weeks have brought some success stories from school.  The picture at the right is a student who I've been working with during lunchtimes--when I assessed him, his reading was far below grade level.  In our early sessions, I could see that he needed help with both phonemic and phonological awareness.  He's been working on both with me and he has started practicing his reading with a cousin at home!  On the d...

 The past couple of weeks have both flown and crept by.  I've been working on focusing on the "long game"--what impacts I can have in the longer term as well as savoring the small victories that I have along the way.  So what's been happening recently?   I started my lunchtime literacy at school.  We've had a couple of good meetings, but then room accessibility became an issue and so they stopped for a bit.  Hopefully, I will start again tomorrow.  I had one of those great teacher moments this week when we were doing a whole-class lesson on marking short and long vowels (using the breve and macron).  My counterpart would say a word and students would write it on their whiteboard and then add in the symbols.  One of my lunchtime students proudly called me over and said "Miss, Miss!  I made the dots!"  The dots are used when we practice aural segmenting--I say a word then students write a dot for every sound they hear in the word...

This week I feel like I made some progress in moving forward at school.  I think I have finally made peace with most of the things that are beyond my control and I'm feeling better about how to deal with these things.  I also had some forward motion on two projects--"lunchtime literacy" and a reading incentive program.  Based on the literacy assessments that I did with our grade 2 students, I've identified a cohort of students who are far below grade level.  So starting this coming week, I'm going to have intensive lunchtime interventions to try to close that gap a little.  The students will still get 30 minutes for lunch, which is more than enough time for them to eat and have a little play break.  The reading program is all planned out, but not quite ready to launch (things beyond my control).    Creole month is coming to a close, and it does so with big celebration.  We had Creole snacks on Wednesday and a full day celebration on Friday at...

 The opening quote this week is almost always attributed to Theodore Roosevelt (I've done it myself in the past).  But in his autobiography, Roosevelt attributes the quote to Bill Widener.  The words encapsulate perfectly where my head has been for the past couple of weeks.  I've been focusing on trying to figure out how I can work toward the goals I've started setting for my service and what I need to do in order to feel like I am being of service.  I continue to struggle with the lack of autonomy, but shifting my mind to focus on what I can do  rather than what I cannot has been very helpful.  An example from this week to illustrate... A couple weeks ago, I ended the week exhausted with myself and how I was responding to the children's behaviors.  I was particularly tired of how often I was yelling at the students--I hate it, I really do.  It's exhausting to do and frankly, it doesn't make any difference.  So why the hell did I keep ye...

  Thank you to everyone who submitted questions for me!  I've mixed it up in terms of content delivery this week and made a slide show with the answers to your questions.  In honor of Creole Month, I've set it to some traditional Creole folk music (you can see the name of artist and song on 1st slide).   NOTE: Make sure to view in full screen mode.  The timing is set at about 20 seconds/slide, so if you need more time to read, hit pause!  😆