Sexual Harassment Training

Today, our staff was trained in sexual harassment. Well, we were trained in how not to sexually harass others. I learned a lot.

*Do not lick my lips suggestively in the presence of others.

*Do not rub myself suggestively in the presence of others.

*Do not repeatedly comment on another employee's body.

However, I do have some lingering questions that were not answered. I was just too embarrassed to ask. I really think they should have provided an anonymous question box like we use during sex education.

1.) What exactly differentiates suggestive lip licking or rubbing oneself from nonsuggestive lip licking and rubbing of oneself?
2.)Do all of these rules still apply if you are with other employees but everyone is drunk or is there like a what happens at the party stays at the party rule?

Anyway, I got NO WORK done today due to this extremely productive meeting and I have an RED meeting at 7am and another training at 1pm tomorrow. I feel like I am never going to catch up with all the work I need to do!

Don't Know How to Feel

It feels like it should be raining. It feels like I should be walking down a silvery city street. It feels like I should be walking alone until I just can't walk anymore.

If I were walking away, and someone were standing behind me, they would hear my footsteps fade like heart beats. It would be easier to hear that than to say goodbye.

Tonight I heard my Granny's voice for the first time in probably six years, but probably for the last time. It is strange for me because I never see my Dad's side of the family, but they never forgot about me and my brothers. I am glad I got to talk to her before the end, but I feel very alone in this struggle. I found that I couldn't say goodbye. I just said, "It's been too long."

999 Dead Tiny Sea Turtles

The story in our reader this week is called Turtle Bay. It is actually a very cute story and the kids really like it. It is about a wise old man who befriends two kids in Japan. Together they watch sea turtles come ashore and lay eggs and then watch the baby sea turtles go into the ocean.

I thought I would tie in an informational story about sea turtles returning to the beach where they were born before we read the story. So, this morning, I went to the school library to look through our books on sea turtles. I found a story with beautiful illustrations called One Tiny Sea Turtle. It looked about the right length and seemed like a good tie in, so I didn't bother to read the whole thing in the morning.

Reading time rolled around and I decided to start my lesson by reading the kids One Tiny Sea Turtle. I started reading the story and the kids were really into it. The baby turtle hatched and went into the ocean. She swam around for years. She made her own nest and laid eggs on the beach.

Then, we got to the part where the baby sea turtles hatched. I started to notice something was up before the kids because there were these ominous looking sea gulls overhead in the picture, and then these evil white crabs came. Well, the crabs and the gulls massacred the baby sea turtles until only one tiny sea turtle survived.

The looks on my kids faces went from awe and wonder to horror.

In the end, I still think the lesson was good because it did help the kids understand the story and nature is what nature is, BUT it was not exactly the way I pictured that lesson going...

A Nice Story About Us

Just as I vow to focus on the positive in teaching, the local newspaper ran a positive story about my school helping a family whose son went blind and helping that student to enroll in public school part time (he's at a school for the blind most of the week). The parents of the family talked about how wonderful our school was.

There You Are

I mentioned before that I have a non-reader. He came to my classroom on the first day of school so quiet and unobtrusive. I have a sense that he just wanted to fade. He was as close as a third grader can come to being invisible.

I was in a place on that first day of school where I saw someone who had become so good at hiding.

I remember on the third week of school, we were taking a district writing test. I am not allowed to read the kids the prompt, and he couldn't read, so he just sat there. I got permission to read it to him. Then I said to him, "It's okay, just do your best and that will be enough. That is all that I expect." He wrote one sentence, but his paper might have been blank.

Yesterday, I gave the kids a prompt that said, "teachers have heard every excuse in the book about not turning in homework, except for the one you are about to write, write Ms. Understood a letter with the craziest, zaniest excuse about why you did not do your homework." He came up to me and showed me his journal, with two paragraphs! "Will you read it for us?" I asked. So he read his crazy, zany excuse. I couldn't have read it because he is not literate enough yet for it to be easily read, but when he read it we all heard him.

I was watching him today interacting with other kids and laughing and smiling. I just thought, "there you are."

The Why

The last month of my life has been a little rough. My house is still looking a little bit like a bunker because we are still hiding from my friend's soon-to-be ex-husband. Every noise in the night is still a little bit frightening.

I am working all of the time and barely keeping up. Money is still really tight. I've been trying to finish Career Ladder and my Capstone project for graduate school.

My mind is always whirring. I am thinking about test scores and account balances and locking the door and deadlines. I find myself looking at the calendar all the time to estimate the date when money trouble and friend drama and Career Ladder and Graduate School and lesson plans will be over.

Okay, I am getting all of this off my chest because it is time to turn the corner.

I use this blog always to speak the truth. I've said before and I will say again, "In education, we have to lie all the time." I never want to be politically correct and well-behaved on my blog. Sometimes it really sucks working in education. I always give myself license to say that here because I would go CRAZY if I were to pretend that is not the case.

However, my life as a teacher is also rewarding and filled with beautiful moments that pass by like perfect white clouds in a blue sky. I have only so much time to record my thoughts and experiences in writing, and I have to wonder which thoughts really merit recording. I witness hundreds of stories daily. I could cry a river about the tiny tragedies I witness daily, but sometimes I should take time to remember the rainbows. So, for a while, I am going to use my blogging time to reflect on the amazing things I get to see and sometimes have a part in--the things that make all the other stuff worth it.

Run

When I was a little girl, I used to have recurring dreams about running away from bad dark things that were chasing me. Sometimes it was a pack of dogs chasing me. Sometimes it was a bad man. Always, I would run to escape. I had that dream for the last time when I was about twenty. I'll never forget that dream because I was being chased by a masked criminal, but I refused to run. The criminal took off his mask and it was my dad. Had he been chasing me in my dreams all those years waiting for me to confront him. I don't know, but the dreams quit coming.

I am having another running dream, but this time I am running to get some place. The problem is that it is like I am running on a treadmill and I can't get anywhere. I think I am dreaming about running because that is the pace of my life right now. I get up early and my day is filled from morning to night with work only. I feel like I work and work and work, but it is still not enough and I am failing to meet the needs of my class.

I do want to be a more balanced person than I have been in the past while I am teaching. It is not happening, though.