Today I signed a lease on a home in Jackson! I’m so excited – it’s a duplex in the neighborhood where my school is located. It’s cute on the outside and needs some work on the inside, but my landlords are fixing it up before we move in on Monday. Today was an adventure of …
On Thursday, I moved out of Delta State University and to Jackson, where I’ll be teaching for the next two years. I’m looking for housing right now, and I’ve gotten connected to a place that will hopefully work out – a house near my school that I’ll rent with a roommate. I’m going to see …
I’m really proud of this student’s exit ticket – we’ve been working a lot on comprehension with word problems and learning how to describe what we did to solve the problem. Also, I think it’s flat out adorable that they wrote “but wait, how can I do the next one.” School went a bit better today. …
“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” -Fannie Lou Hamer In the wake of the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, I’m feeling pain and the fear that it will happen again. I also understand that, because I’m white, my pain is so small in comparison to the pain that the Black community feels in response to …
Last night there was a pretty big thunderstorm in Cleveland. Not alarmingly big – we didn’t lose power, I was never concerned for my safety, and for me, it was more of a nuisance than anything else. After all, I wanted to go over to the student union to print a few things and make …
In TFA, there’s a lot of talk of transformational change. It’s an organizational core value, and it’s emphasized pretty regularly. It’s hard to understand, though, what it means for me personally. Changes in my life tend to manifest in big, dramatic ways rather than small ones. I feel like, in some way, TFA is transforming …
Today was the first day of summer school, and I think it went really well! I wasn’t responsible for too much in terms of instruction, but I led a part of our procedure practice and I administered our math pre-test. Going into today, I was worried that the kids wouldn’t take the math pre-test seriously, …
My PledgeCents campaign is fully funded! I’m so surprised that it was funded this quickly, and I’m so grateful to everyone who donated. I’m so glad that I’ll be able to get pencils and crayons and paper and other school supplies for my students this fall. Yesterday, we set up our classrooms for summer school. …
Today was the start of Institute, TFA’s five week long training program. There’s all sorts of Institute lore that I’ve heard – that it’s a bootcamp for teachers, that it’s intended to break you, that no one gets any sleep. There was some effort to prove those ideas false, a lot of talk of managing …
One of the staff said that everyone who comes to Mississippi for Teach for America does one of the three M’s – they get married, they get a mutt, or they run a marathon. Dating someone you meet in Teach for America is common enough that Teach for America made a dating app joke for April …