One of my sweet little guys came to school on Monday with one of those stickers you can put on the window... it was s pumpkin one. He said, "teacher I brought this for Heba because she is so kind." how sweet is that?! they are learning all about how to be a kind friend in my class, and when they are kind they get rewarded by getting to wear the crown. They are so kind now that even though they love the crown, they want to share it when they get it. Even though I feel like most days I am doing a lot of things wrong, when I see moments like this I know at least God is using me to teach them something good.

MEA baby!

so it has been awhile since I have posted- for a few reasons:
1. there have been some really really hard days that I want to forget
2. the days that have been ok or good I am really too tired to write anything when I get home

But now here we are on MEA, our four day break that many teachers look forward to. It came at the perfect time as I may not have made it through another four day week. Ok so here I am whining about this wonderful job but it is just a lot harder than I thought it would be. I am seeing how impatient I am, how little I know about what kindergarteners should be able to do at this age (I mean should they be able to write "b" and if so should they stay in those lines on the big lined paper?) so my patience is being tested adn I am expecting them to be doing things that like most fourth graders can't do (stand in the hall semi-quietly). So I am growing and praying that I will come out of this stronger, more gentle, more patient, and more kind.

Funny story- the other day one of my Mohameds, out of the blue, said "Teacher I am an Aftican boy!" random and true and funny. he was so proud too, which was cute.

anyways, not too much to say at the moment I just wanted to check in and clarify that I have made it through the first month (now month and a half I guess!) pray I will be more patient and understanding and nice when I manage the class. I hate feeling so mean to them, even though sometimes it is essential.

"stop tittling me"

so I have this student who struggles with the /k/ sound and so one day when there was mad chaos in the line up while waiting for the bathroom I called up my little guy to ask what had happened... all he was saying was, "he is tittling me... he is tittling me... he is tittling me..." which written out is easier to understand than him shouting it in his tiny little voice. I had no idea what he was saying and kept asking, "What? He is hitting you? touching you?..." Finally he had to ACT OUT tickling so he could show me what he meant. It was then that I figured out what he meant and VERY sternly had to say to his friend, "WE DO NOT TICKLE OUR FRIENDS AT SCHOOL." It was SO hard not to laugh as I have never had to say something so ridiculous so sternly. Anyways I also figured out that I have to work with him on some speech therapy. So we are practicing the /k/ sound. It was great.

a startling discovery

so even though I am so wiped and have to get to bed and I can't rest without documenting this one. I have four "Mohamed"s in my class, and today, FOR THE FIRST TIME, Mohamed Ali realized there was someone else in the room who shared his name. I saw the lightbulb go off as I was focusing on the M sound and I had them stand up when I said the sound that their name started with and four boys stood up for M... Mohamed Ali said, "Your name is Mohamed? Hey. My name is Mohamed too." It was priceless.

here i am...

so here I am... 7:21 AM getting ready for the kids to come. and here we go again. yesterday the kids all had to go to the bathroom during a time when we are not signed up to go, so I had them go with my EA in small groups. So then, TEN MINUTES LATER, when we were going outside they all had to go again. Its just like, come on guys, how do you have to go all the time?! I don't know why I am sharing that at the moment its just a frustration I was sharing with one of the other Kindergarten teachers next door. Life here at Twin Cities Int. is pretty good, the kids are hopefully learning and I am for sure learning so much about being a teacher.
Yesterday I had this great epiphany that the Lord's favor transcends just me in my little Christian world. Before being at this school, for the last few years I have been at Bethel and Camp- two ministries. In this, I prayed for God to open doors and work and at those places I believe they were praying and seeking Him too. Well at this school, I don't really think the administration is praying through the decisions of whom to hire, BUT GOD (my new favorite phrase). BUT GOD still opened a door and made a way for me to work here and got me a job and is working in my life here at this school where they were not per say asking for His guidance. He is so big, so much bigger than I could ever imagine. And I am thankful to be here.

Always Learning

So now that I have been teaching for three days, I have more thoughts than just random “I don’t know what I am doing.” I am realizing that I will always learn something new every day of my teaching career. Today I have been learning that teaching is teaching me how to slow down and focus on the kids the whole day and not on myself. Today when they were napping and I was trying to cut some things out for a bulletin board I was thinking, what I am doing? I could easily do this when they leave for the day, why now? (Because they were restless and moving around a lot and getting up a lot and trying to not nap and I just kept mindlessly redirecting them to lay back down without taking the time to go and talk to them about it or rub their back or anything.) I am learning how to focus on the kids more than the details of getting the many random tasks teachers have to do done throughout the days. So tomorrow, all kids all day and random things after they leave.

A few more random things that have happened:
I have one kid who HATES nap time. Every single time he starts crying, and kind of out of the blue. Like the kids are quiet and he is laying down and all of a sudden he just jumps up weeping and just runs over to me saying, “I want my mommy and daddy.” And it was sad but kind of funny because right before naptime one of the other boys goes, “I bet he is going to start crying again…” kind of making fun of him but not trying to. It was sad and cute. But anyways today, as I predicted, he started crying so I had him work with me for a little bit on an assessment I had to do then had him lay down and rubbed his back and he actually fell asleep! Talk about an accomplishment in room 131.

They are just learning how to have friends for the first time and it is so cute. We do some switching of the classes, so some of the kids leave my room to go to another room because of their test scores of what they took this week (they try to chunk the kids for the betterment of their learning so some of the higher and lower kids get moved around the first week.) And so anyways when we walk in the halls they have to have a bubble in their mouth so no one can talk and I am pretty scrict about it especially for the first few weeks I will be. So anyways we were walking and one of our old students who moved classes walked by and one of my current students was like shouting his name, for so long, and the only reason I didn’t stop him is because he was saying, “Hello, hello. Hey do you want to be my friend still? Do you want to be my friend?” And then finally the kid heard him and said, “yes.” It was just so sweet.

At recess all of a sudden one of my girls sprinted up to me crying so hard and I could see why immediately. Her hajib (the head scarf the women wear) had fallen off accidentally. Anyways she was just standing there crying and couldn’t even tell me what happened which was really sad to watch, plus I don’t know culturally what that would be like (which I am still looking into and will most likely write more about once I know). Anyways I didn’t know if for her it felt like her shirt had fallen off or maybe her hair had fallen out or what… so right away I put it back on and she was pretty shook up about it for a little while. All of my girls wear them, so I have never seen any of their hair before. It was just an interesting part of teaching at this particular school.

Today we walked around the hallways for like 20 minutes to practice being quiet and in a line, which is really risky as a first year teacher bc all of the staff could see me when I would walk by their room and if my students were a mess it would totally be a reflection of me, so that is why it took me until today to do it. But I have to say my kids were AWESOME, they were practically acting like first graders who actually kind of know what to do. It was by far the highlight of my day.

That’s all for now… I wonder what tomorrow will bring.

The First Day

Ok so my first day of my first year was actually pretty good. Of course there was one horror story though; its hard to make it through the first day of the first year without one (I hope). So this morning in the midst of the chaos of having all of my students come in, trying to meet them all and show them where to put their bags and get them breakfast and sit them down and make sure they didn’t spill or cry or pee their pants, this woman walks in and very assertively tells me that the little boy with her, whom she calls Mohamed Mohamed, is in my class. Her assertiveness implied to me that she worked at the school and was part of the administrative team (that I apparently hadn’t met yet?) so anyways I didn’t think much of it. So this entire day Mohamed Mohamed is with me in my class and I am referring to him as Mohamed M (to differentiate between the other Mohamed’s in my class)… and its not a big deal. Then towards the end of the day it kind of dawned on me that because this boy was not on my attendance I didn’t have any of his information or his bus number, and therefore didn’t know what to do with him at 2:05 when we walked the kids out to the bus (it was like 1:30 at the moment). So I made a call to the office to ask where I should send this “Mohamed Mohamed” and suddenly my good first day of teaching turned really bad really quick. “Which Mohamed Mohamed do you have?” a panicked voice asked from the office. I wasn’t sure as all I knew was some lady brought him to me and told me that was his name. I was told to send him down to the office immediately so they could figure out who this boy was and what they were to do with him. I had no information on him, no bus number, no phone number, nothing. All this to say it wasn’t looking good. Meanwhile I had to walk my other students out to the buses (having them all hold a rope in their hands while doing it mind you…) and this whole time I am preoccupied thinking about Mohamed Mohamed hoping they had gotten a hold of his family. All of a sudden out of the corner of my eye I see one of the administrators of the middle school; walking this child, by hand, to each individual bus (of our 24 buses) asking any of the kids if he looked familiar to them. This was suddenly a much bigger deal than I had anticipated. Then once I was done dropping all of my students off I could still see my little guy being escorted around… and by this point all of the teachers are done and they are all waiting to go in but this boy is holding EVERYONE up. All of the 24 buses and staff. Needless to say it felt like the whole school was staring at me thinking, “What were you thinking having this unidentified child in your class all day?” I hope this is one of the most humiliating and scary moments of my teaching career. After all of the buses left we discovered that his name is in fact Mohamed Mohamed Feral (or something like that) and he WAS in fact in my class on my attendance sheet- so we did have his information! So the administrator of the middle school brought him home and all ended well.

Besides that mess, the day was pretty good. I think I said, “Please sit down, criss cross applesauce” maybe 150 times, who knows maybe even more. I know I said it at least ten times in a row to this one girl who was staring me as if she didn’t understand what I was saying. (I am pretty sure she did, and I was motioning it to her as well and showing her a picture of someone sitting down.) Ok so its 9:23 and I was going to go to bed at 9:00 so I have to sign off for the night. I am sure there will be much more time to process and many more thoughts and stories in the days to come. Long story short- I had three kids crying today bc they missed home, I made the kids sleep on the floor without their mats because I didn’t have time to give them to them, they only got 4 minutes to play outside because it took us so long to get through the bathroom, they did not know how to even wash their hands and I had one girl drinking out of the sink, I have cards with pictures of kids having a closed mouth and sitting on the floor and sitting in a chair that I point to when I want them to do something which will most likely save my voice as a teacher… and I am excited for another chance to try again tomorrow. Hopefully no chaos tomorrow with Mohamed Mohamed. That is my goal! I am learning to coin this phrase for teaching, “Courage does not always roar. Sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day that says, ‘I will try again tomorrow’.”

I am the Teacher

Ok so I don’t know how to add anything to my own blog. How weird is that. Like I started blogging and then now can’t get into my own blog to add another post so I am typing this in Word in hopes of someday getting in and posting. Yikes.

I am feeling ok about the first day tomorrow, actually pretty good. I took a random and funny video to show and am not sure it is going to work… but if it does some of this might be repeats. I am doing my best not to freak out about tomorrow being my first day as a real teacher, all day just me and 20 five year olds. Today all day long we had an open house at the school so kids and their families kept coming in and out of my room and it was kind of surreal, like am I really a teacher? One kid who was an older sibling came in and I was working on something and he looked around and asked, “where is the teacher?” And so I automatically responded that I was but as I was saying it the reality of tomorrow hit me in the face. I am a teacher. I am going to be responsible for the education of 20 five year olds. There is no one else to fall back on (like when I was student teaching I felt the weight of that a little but if I screwed up a lesson the teacher could easily fix or reteach it.) But it’s just me and those kids all day long together. It was scary and real and exciting all at the same time.

As far as tomorrow goes, the plan is to go through a lot of procedures. Procedures procedures procedures all day long. Like how to sit down on the carpet. How to sit in a chair to work. How to transition from the carpet to the chair. How to line up. How to walk in the hallway. How to transition from the classroom to the bathroom. How to wash your hands. Like we literally have to bring them all in the bathroom, turn on the water, and SHOW them how to put soap on your hands and wash and dry them. And then we have them all practice and do it a few times! The hard part of these things is that we have to be really clear and specific the first week or two (especially the first day when all we do is practice) and I don’t really have the experience to know what is going to work best for this age. So I will be learning with them and changing my mind and plans a lot in the next few weeks, but it all starts tomorrow. I spent like two hours today looking up pictures of stick figures raising their hands, having a closed mouth, sitting on the floor… to print off to hold up to show them how to do things! It is a great thing for Kindergarteners who can’t really read yet and it is also great for ESL learners whose second language is English as the visual is extremely helpful for them in the learning process. It was fun to meet some of the kids today and talk with them and their parents. I was extremely impressed with the English of the parents, they could all communicate with me which I was not expecting.

Anyways, we are going to meet at school at 6:30 tomorrow to get last minute things ready for the first day! Which means I am going to bed soon… goodnight and pray for me tomorrow. I just hope no one poops their pants or throws up on me or anything. I have heard those nightmare stories from first year teachers and hope I don’t have one of those.

Four Days In

So I am only four days into this whole teaching thing and I am already feeling in over my head and questioning whether or not this whole teaching thing is really for me. NOT persay because teaching isn't for me but because teachers (and adults for that matter) do a lot of work and this is my first real experience being in that hard-working-professional-adult world and I am not quite sure I am ready for it. The more time I spend at school in my classroom and at my school the more appreciation I have the working-folk; I guess this is called growing up. In this process of "growing-up" over the last four days there have for sure been some tears as well as some, "I don't want to be a teacher anymore..." whines that I am sure will pass the more comfortable I get in the school and in my classroom. Please thank Chris for taking the brunt of those moments, he really deserves a medal or something for putting up with me this week. :)

Now if I am going to claim to be overwhelmed I better try and explain why. Here is my best attempt to explain my bamboozled mind: the way that I funcion as a worker is to get a task and then do it right away. The overwhelming thing about these first few days of workshops stems from the fact that I have been getting bombarded with different things to do and not much time yet to do them. The first two days in particular were quite exhasuting as all I did was sit and listen to the thousands (literally) of things I will be doing and details I will be remembering and students I will be working with for the next nine months. On top of that I don't know how to do a lot of these things or these are processes that take months of experience to perfect. I also am not familiar with any of the cirriculum I am going to be teaching which does not help in my "not knowing what to do or how to do it" first week of my first year.

The hope I have is coming from the many teachers who, remembering back to their first days in their classroom, can empathize with my stress and continually remind me that I am going to get everything done and I am going to figure out this whole teaching thing. I feel like teaching has some rhythm to it, you have to get into it and feel it and flow with the constant changes to the perfectly made plans. I have not yet felt this flow but trust and pray that soon I will.

Enough of the sorrow. There are some wonderful things about my school that I am going to do a better job of focusing on... First of all Twin Cities International is a school created for East African families, so most of my students will be coming from the country of Somalia. This is quite exciting to me but also a bit intimidating as I really don't know very much about that culture or people group. All I know is what I read in the book on Somolia I was given after being hired for this position. Here are some interesting facts I have gathered thus far:
-People from Somalia are called Somali or Somalis, not Somalians
-Somalis eat bananas with some of their main dishes to balance the spices
-Somalis generally do not touch people of the opposite gender
-Somalis are very frightened by dogs (which is a bummer for my students because today when I was opening their new math journals they will be working with daily I noticed that there were very large images of dogs on both sides)
-Somali people gernally do not celebrate birthdays
-Ramadan, the 30 day fast they as partake in, starts either August 21 or 22 depending on the moon. During this fast they only eat before the sun rises and after the sun sets.
-Somali names are quite different then our American names and they go as follows: Name, Father's Name, Grandfather's Name. There are no last names but the names of the father and grandfather are passed on to both girls and boys. If that were the case in America you would call me Justie Mark Leeland. Funny!
I guess that might be enough fun facts for now, but believe me there will be many more to come as I continue to learn through reading and asking questions and experiences.

Another really fun thing for me is that I am going to be working downtown Minneapolis! I have had the joy of being part of morning traffic, which really has not been bad at all. I love when I exit on 94 and turn onto Washington when I can see all of the buildings and commotion going on in the morning. It is one of my favorite moments of my day as I anticipate all that the day ahead could potentially hold. While I am in no way unsafe being downtown, we do need to be careful in the area of the school as you never know who might be coming around in that part of town. I was informed to always lock my car, try to leave while it is still light out, and always look under my car before going home. One of the old staff members shared with me that last year a homeless man would sleep in the bushes right outside in front of the school. :) Kind of cute I think, and I guess I wouldn't mind seeing a few buddies like that napping in the bushes in my time here (considering we all stay safe which I see no problems with.) There is a security guard in the school and I have no doubt he'll take care of us.

My last favorite thing about my new job is the team of girls I am going to be working with. At TIES (that is how they refer to Twin Cities International Elementary School) there is a lot of staff collaboration and team work in both planning and teaching, and from the moment I met my team my heart rested in knowing that I will be taken care of this year and will have a lot of fun! I really enjoy all of the five girls I will be working with, we are a young team and have already had quite a few laughs together. I am excited to be spending more time with them and getting to know them more as I pick their brains with how to set up my room, when and how to use the flashcards scattered throughout my drawers... etc.

So here is my REAL favorite part about this whole deal, I know without a shadow of a doubt that by being in Minneapolis and teaching at this school that I am directly in the center of God's will for my life right now. I know there is a purpose for me being there. I know God is going to be a fence around me everyday. I know I am going to learn so much in my time there. And I know God is going to use me to teach these little ones as well. Please pray for me. Pray for safety, for patience with myself as I learn how to teach, for patience with my students as I am sure 20 five year olds can get overwhelming, growth as God continues to stretch and shape me through this experience, and sanity as I navigate becoming an adult and growing up.

Love.