Queen Browser.

stink bugs

I feel really sleepy today for some odd ball reason. I had all intentions of coming home and being productive, but settled with sitting on the couch for two hours, looking at fashion blogs, and eating sunflower seeds.

I’m now up, and ready to make the rest of the evening a productive one.

The photo attached below is of me and my assistant teachers. They are wonderful people. I love my job. I love my students.

I love the relationship I have with my family. I love the silence in my apartment. I love the crush I have on the manager at CVS.

I sent him a secret admirer card in the mail this morning. His name is Alex and he is dreamy. I don’t have any expectations, but everyone should know that they are dreamy. I left my number on that card, but any African man that fine is bound to be married or engaged. They just don’t stay single for shits and giggles—that’s an American tradition. (source: Rickita’s loose observation).

Since I haven’t posted in ages, you should know that I was dating this fine gentleman for two years before we decided to be friends. We are friends, who care deeply about each other. I am optimistic that things will work out, but as my brother not so eloquently stated, “don’t be forcing shit yo’, when you force shit ‘den you be making anyone you meet THE ONE.” It made perfectly good sense to me. I love my brother for the advice. I truly do love him.

Alright dinner time. I will be back on Friday or Saturday to let you—errr—no one, because I have no followers—know what happened with Mr. Alex CVS

i got internet again

i’m really in no mood to deal with the shift key for this post, so i will type in all lower case, even though afterward i always feel guilty.

being poor requires you to prioritize. i’ve been living damn near a monk life. churning butter, using a over sized cheese grater as my wash board, and paying for gas in coins became my favorite past times. but i have a new job and i’ve seemed to have my financial life in order to afford internet. so here i am, nearly a year later, trying to rebuild my blog. i was in traffic imagining where i could go with this thing, but undoubtedly it will become what it always has…a little bit of everything type of shit.

and i don’t really have much to offer outside of busied rants about special education. BUT (okay needed the shift to emphasize this particular point) i have a new group of students and they are autistic. kids on the spectrum make you laugh, cry and smile. sometimes all at once.

so i would imagine that most of my blogs will be about them, but also about random shit that i’ve discovered on the internet. my productivity is damn near at zero. most of my evenings now are spent eating an entire bag of barcelona sunflower seeds and calling it dinner.

i always feel so hood going into the corner store buying the sunflower seeds. i typically drag in my big ass purse, wait for the store to be vacant and buy my bag of seeds. i quickly throw them in my purse and suspiciously walk back to my car like i just scored some coke. i don’t know where this stems from. i do have hood tendencies, but sunflower seeds just seem to be the pinnacle of ghetto living. i don’t spit them on the ground, and i don’t eat them on the metro.

i come home, grab a loose leaf paper or paper towel, crack them open until there’s a neat pile on my paper and only sunflower seed “dust” remaining on my hands.

anyway, the point is i’m single. well maybe it’s complicated. because of this i don’t have to prepare dinner, i can eat sunflower seeds in my underwear and i can go to bed having not shaved my legs in about three days.

it’s both welcoming and depressing. i haven’t decided who wins.

i’m half way listening to louis ck and he’s pretty awesome. going to make dinner and bake cookies.

i’m back. again.

The Toughest Job

Okay clearly I swiped that from Chancellor Rhee’s February 9 OpEd:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/08/AR2009020801711.html?sid=ST2009020901784&s_pos=

Nonetheless I couldn’t find a more fitting title. The past five months have been incredibly tough. It’s been a string of sleepless nights and tearful mornings.

I’ve never done anything this hard in my life. And this is coming from someone who was abandoned by 14, only to take care of herself through sophomore year in college.

That shit wasn’t even hard. I proved I could survive; that I could adapt to change.

But teaching is its own beast. And teaching in DC is its own battlefield. It’s a place where Office of State Superintendent of Education, District of Columbia Public Schools, and District of Columbia Public Charter Schools are all fighting for power and attention. It’s a place where teachers spend their staff development time watching Hancock. It’s a place where principals hide in offices bombarded with paperwork. It’s a place where the average high school student has a fifth grade level.

Imagine my surprise when reading an IEP and thinking ‘Oh wow this 18 year old has a sixth grade reading level’. Talk about expectations.

And yet I love teaching. I love being around my kids.

I can’t wrap my head around it though. As much as you do, you feel like you are no closer to achieving. I’ve become that pessimist that I had sat beside in so many workshops and trainings.

I still recognise fragments of hope, energy, dedication, motivation and persistence I had when I first walked into my dear old school. But even my students noticed that I look run down. My hair is disheveled. My heels are lower. My eyes are gloomy.

And I’ve lost friends. Who wants to go out on Friday?

But I love teaching. I love my kids.

I have to remind myself of that everyday…if not I would probably just quit.

Yeah, I’m back temporarily. Bitter and tired as hell. But I’m back.

so today was the last day for grades. that meant i spent most of my time accommodating and modifying material for my sped students. i found some time to run to the hospital to visit one of my students and finally get her mom to sign off on this highly important legal document.

i was tempted to admit myself to the hospital. tell them that i was suffering from imburntoutlikeamothafuckaitis. while tempted to do just that, i opted out and instead held a pseudo iep meeting in the parking deck of children’s hospital.

i came back only to return to helping ro-ro pass this government final. jesus this child needs more support and her attitude doesn’t motivate me to help. i struggled through getting her to finish the government and history exams, but we did and she might just be alright.

part of being a teacher, especially a special ed teacher is having a life-long supply of patience. i mean patience to stand the students who take 7 minutes to solve a problem like 1.84 x 3.5. In your head you’re thinking ‘dawg this shit is easy as hell’, but you can’t. instead you have to things like ‘ok great now what do you do with that 3’?

or when you tell them that the formula for area is A=length x width, and you ask them to solve the following:

the rectangular prism had a length of 18.8 and the width as half of the length, what is the area of the rectangular prism. oh jesus. sweet lord. give me the strength to walk this child through this fucking problem. and some days you do. you walk them through it, you explain that when you see the word ‘half’ you divide the length by 2. other times you just set up the problem and hand them the calculator, ‘here, plug it in. great you got the right answer!’

papers are the worst. jesus. but i’ll save those examples (for there are many) for a later date.

but that wasn’t the worst part of my day. no, not the being hugged by the mustiest child in the building (and constantly being reminded of it, as there was a faint smell of him following me throughout the day), explaining more than 10 times why the students should go to the college fair, or trying to deal with a student who got put out of class and will not sit still long enough for me to call his mom to pick his worrysome ass up!

no that wasn’t anything. typical day.

i went to get my hair trimmed and walked out looking like

Shasha Thump with the freeze curls

i’ve never cried after receiving a haircut, but i did tonight and this bitch said the dumbest thing.

me: “this is just bad. bad”

her: “in three weeks you are coming to come to me and be like, i love it thank you!”

me: “who walks around and says ‘girl come see me in three weeks, i’m going to be fly!’?”

it makes no sense. i walked out and cried when i got home. ihere is nothing worse than feeling stuck with a hairdo you know will take at least a month until you can feel confident.

so i’ve been spending my evening looking at ‘glueing in hair weaves’ tutorials on youtube. i might post the before and after tomorrow.

i’m going to bed. i gotta work tomorrow.