so here's the thing

all day and half of last night my little inner voices have been arguing with each other. am i admitting to craziness? not quite. perhaps you might relate.

have you ever found yourself wondering if you're doing the right thing? i have found that it is very disconcerting to really try to do what you believe is right, and then have people question you or not understand you. granted i am not referring to some huge crisis, just a small one.

last evening, i received an email from a parent, a really good, caring parent. she tells me that her daughter hates school, which she has never done before. the mother tells me that she doesn't remember 8th grade being this hard for her older two kids, one of whom i taught. she is concerned that religion is too hard. she asked me to respond her email with my thoughts when i get a chance.

so of course, my brain has been whirring with potential responses since i read the email last evening. my first thought is that i feel really awful that her daughter is hating school for the first time ever because of my classes. maybe it's not just mine, but i think it's safe to assume that mine must be the worst. as i have always hoped to create an environment that made students feel encouraged and excited to learn, it's really a blow to hear that someone hates what i am doing.

so then i must question: am i too hard, especially in religion? i know that i expect the kids to learn the material of church history, which has a lot of names and events that most people don't know, much less 8th graders. i don't give open book tests, as i suppose other teachers do. so is it wrong to expect them to learn this info? i give them notes and a study guide; we do activities that i intend to help kids learn the material. some do very well, but some, like this girl i guess, are overwhelmed. then there is this diocesan-wide test, the acre test, that measures how well our school teaches religion. and there is so much they don't seem to know/remember.

then do i change it? am i doing something wrong? i really don't think i expect too much. it is harder perhaps, but so is high school. i guess the hardest part for me to know is whether i'm doing the right thing the right way for the right reasons. i sure try to. is that enough?

Oh, hello again

ummm, oops.

i kinda forgot about this guy. all my writing i've done has been for class or school, so internet kinda fell off my plate.

anyway. life's pretty good. today was pretty great because i scrapbooked with some friends. three more pages almost completed in the scrapbook i realized i've had in my possession since '01. silly me.

i actually have a few stories i mean to share on this site . . .eventually. i must get to bed as, well, i have to get to the good part in the book i'm reading. (i'd tell you what that book is, but i'm a bit embarrassed . . .kind of a fluffy one, but at least no one is having sex on the cover. inside the cover, a little.)

sooo, off to the book!

One of those weird days where you know someone out there is listening

My brain is a dryer right now . . . thoughts are tumbling around inside of it, and I'm trying to make sense of what just whirled past. Was that a sock? Or underwear? You get the picture, I hope.

I really didn't intend to write anything today, but bam! sometimes life just hits you with things you shouldn't ignore. Being at church this morning I was reminded just why I make the trek down there every time I can. First of all, I just love how my choir people welcome me right in, even though I'm barely there in time for mass these days, much less choir practice. Secondly, I had a little nun who about comes up to my belly button ask me if I intended to come to the Lenten stations of the cross this year because she remembers the reflection I gave two years ago, and she was so touched by that. Awh! Third, I get to see my friends at church there, and this weekend, the Radelets and the Zlatic parents were there to celebrate Mark and Joe's first birthday. I like them (the parents; I already really like the others) more every time I see them. Then Fr. Greg's homily was pretty great; he said something that I wanted to remember . . .something attributed to St. Francis (whose feast we celebrated today). . .something like "I have done what I was meant to do; I pray that you do the same" or something along those lines.

But the biggest sense that there is someone out there who wants to reassure me came post-Mass. I was briefly shopping around in the Sarah Center, a store in the old St. Francis bookstore that sells crafts made by women in OTR, and the proprietor of the store tells me, "Oh, I love your hair!" Now, you must understand, I have a very love/hate relationship with my hair. It is a massive, messy mane that takes far more time than I had this morning to get the fly-aways to cooperate, to get the curls to lay together, etc. In short, I was feeling a little anxious about having not tied it back before getting to mass; instead hoping that however it airdried would be tolerable. But by this time, I could feel the frizz. So I responded to the lady, "Oh, thanks. It's a little crazy and frizzy this morning! Didn't have time to really fix it."
Her response? "But that's precisely what makes it beautiful."

Huh? Say again? I don't get it. My hair is beautiful . . . because it is frizzy? Not despite it? I . . .don't know what to say. If that is true . . .well, then I've been thinking about beauty in entirely the wrong way.
So I've been thinking about what this lady said ever since. And I'm still thinking on it. I'll get back to you.

But here's an appreciation of beauty that DIDN'T surprise me. I received the most comments today on my shoes. Now, since I love shoes and own quite a few pairs, it is not unheard of that people will comment on whichever pair I'm wearing. But these shoes, well, I'll admit, even I find them dazzling. They include about 4 inches of a narrow, golden heel; long, pointed toes; and this brilliant metallic purple hue that matched rather well with my purple top. They're hard as hell to walk or stand in for very long, but they get a lot of admirers. You know who really seems to like them the most? Men. Yes, men seem to LOVE heels. The taller, the better. I had one random guy stop me and say, "You know, I just have to tell you how much I love your shoes! I saw you walk in today, and thought they were great!"
Um. Ok. Thanks. Now don't have an orgasm over it.
I could feel the eyes of the men in OTR staring at my feet and figured they were admiring the shoes, too. No one said anything directly, but I could hear murmurs as I moseyed past. There is a part of me that would LOVE to better understand the appeal of heels to men. Don't get me wrong; they are stunning (not mine in particular, just in general), but they're the most impractical things. And men love 'em. Women, too, but men feel the need to comment on them like they do nothing else I ever wear. It makes me wonder how many sexual fantasies feature heels. I wonder if I could wear whatever I want, say a potato sack or "mom" jeans and shoulder pads from the 80's, and a pair of pretty heels and still get men to react the same way. If I were a more daring kinda gal, I'd test that out.

And now, to tie all these random things together . . .my point is that I had been wondering if I could be beautiful without special makeup or done-up hair. And the answer seems to be it's possible to be natural and beautiful at the same time . . .if I also wear heels.

Saturday Morning Musings

(Warning: Mom and Dad, if you're reading this, I use some expletives.)

For the first Saturday in several weekends, I don't have to be anywhere until . . .later. Like post-lunch and afternoon snack later. And I often don't appreciate that feeling. I get kind of depressed and lonely feeling if I have nowhere to be right away. But this weekend, I'm going to live it up because I haven't had this freedom of time and this amount of sleep in a while. It feels damn good.

Being able to hit my snooze button for an hour, more or less, and listen to snippets of NPR reports in between was so freeing. I've spent all this week hitting my snooze, and then being almost late to school. In fact, I'm pretty disappointed in myself b/c twice this week I had my homeroom kids waiting outside my door for me to get there and unlock it. At least the first time it was b/c I hadn't set my alarm for the right time, ended up getting ready in 20 minutes, and rushed to school to let them in. The second time was yesterday, and I guess I just watched my time that poorly when I was getting ready. (It was picture day, and I guess I felt it necessary to spend an inordinate amount of time preparing myself for those 2 seconds in front of the camera--I really was less vain when I was younger . . .or maybe not less vain; just less aware of products that could make me like how I look.) Anyway, I'm displeased with myself. Tardiness is only acceptable if it doesn't adversely affect anyone but me.

This has been kind of an interesting little week at school. (I notice that all my posts are about school, it seems, but really it's about 80% of my life now). On Monday, I used the girls' restroom, and as I finished up my business and pushed the door aside, it decided it had had enough of shielding girls' private business, and it detached from its hinges to collapse on my arm. Lovely feeling, that. The subsequent bruise has coordinated nicely with all outfits this week.

Let's see: Tuesday morning was the day I slept till 7:20, when, praise Jesus, Janet realized I wasn't awake and called down to me. Wednesday was the day I felt inordinately depressed with my students b/c they feel almost indifferent to the suffering caused by slavery. It's truly not that they're uncompassionate; it's just they live in a bubble, and they hear all these historical facts over and over, but they're so far removed from them that once the shock value of the stats ends, they just feel the tedium of the repetition of the facts. But still, it just stabs something in me to know how shielded they are from the pain of real people. And, in a total reversal of the tone of the day, I was discussing poetry terms with my 7th period, and in the middle of writing the word "assonance" on the board, I got distracted and just had "ass." The sudden bursts of laughter alerted me to my mistake. Then I just had to shake my head at myself and apologize b/c the day prior to that, with this same class, my little teacher filter wasn't working too well, and I brought up a topic or two I really didn't need to.

Thursday saw my Power of the Pen group meeting; those budding writers are a lot of fun. My former student Katie is helping me with the 7th grade team, and it's just so awesome to have her there! Her help makes everything so much easier.

Friday, the second late day of the week for me, was one of those days of great ups and downs. Crazy, stormy morning that ended on an afternoon of blue skies and sunshine. I felt off for the first hour or so, but things seem to settle down after that. My 3rd period expressed that they are liking writing poems so much better than essays, and they like picking their own topics. And then I have to praise them b/c some of what they are writing, just in rough drafts, is really, really good. I feel so excited when I see it--just the potential of it gives me chills at times. And I had to write two demerits, one to a very nice boy who's a little rambunctious at times and one to sweetheart of a girl, the kind who almost never gets in trouble and cries when she does b/c she's so unused to "being bad." But they both threw pens to someone across the room from themselves, and that just won't work. I felt so badly about seeing how upset the girl was that I wrote her a little note just so she knows I wasn't mad at her and that I don't now label her as a "bad girl." Maybe I worry about that stuff too much; I think I was just such a sensitive kid who hated getting in trouble for any reason that I dread having to punish anyone else. But it must be done.

Oh, and the random other bizarre thing of yesterday: I had a kid in my 4th period ask if he could call me by my first name. Say what?? My response: do you call any of your other teachers by their first names? Of course he says "No" but then proceeds to run a list of variations of my name to see if any will work: "Kerry with a y; Miss Kerry; Berry." He ends with Berry and seems pretty set on that one. I have to firmly tell him that if he wants to call me that, then I'll be writing him a lot of demerits. Kids wanting to call me by my first name reminds me all too much of my first year here when I had this one obnoxious boy refer to me as "Melinda" for half the year. Of course, he got a lot of demerits for that, but he still proceeded to tell kids the next three years to call me that so that even this year, after I haven't seen this boy since May of 07, I still get at least one boy a year asking me if they can call me "Melinda." Hell, no, boy! Now shut the fuck up! But I can't say that for real.

Jeesh, children. Give me a break.

In other news, KC moves back to TX today. And I actually need to go do stuff now.