A little more joy, a little more learning

To bring in the J-factor...

some peeks

We don't wear these costumes every day...it was the Halloween parade!

My little geniuses.

The 2nd grade team, my team and family.

Our future graduates!

The classroom!

And now to our finished apartment! And yes, I painted these walls.

Kitchen!

Living room and our big window over Bedford.

I want to share more, but I am so exhausted and I am even too tired to write about how tired I am. I cried at school for the first time today. November, to say the least, is hard.

of course this would happen

The highlight of my day.

Another highlight of my day:

"Ms. Hahn, did you lose weight?"

-Christian

love hate relationship

I often consider myself lucky that I don't hate my job. I actually must love my job, apparent by the sheer fact that I go every day. I hear from many of my other Teach for America friends with immensely challenging jobs before them that they wake up each morning thinking, "Maybe today I just won't go." Thus because of the absence of these thoughts in my mind, I feel deep down within me that I truly love my job. Sometimes I find myself gazing around at the faces of my students and simply smiling at them. They are so vivacious, they have so much character, and they are so overwhelmingly adorable in the most challenging kind of ways. And other days, like today, when their voices refuse to turn off and I feel the frustration of "I have no idea how to do this right" builds inside of me I just want to go home and pretend that I am in college again, with the LA sun shining dow upon me. But still, I go back the next day.

The best days are those when I can see how far we have come and how far we can go in terms of learning and in terms of growing to love each other. Tomorrow we will finish taking our first cycle of assessments, and from peering over their shoulders during testing I am so pleased with the results that I am seeing...pleased and surprised. A friend said to me that first year teachers go through four stages: 1) Unconsciously unskilled, 2) Consciously unskilled, 3) Consciously skilled, and 4) Unconsciously unskilled. I am confident that I am now at stage 2: I know that at times I completely suck. Though I have grown immensely in my job in the past 8 weeks, sometimes I still here a direction come out of my mouth and think to myself, "This is going to be a disaster." I have one student who knows little structure in the home. He is moving in and out of shelters so frequently that structure is simply unknown to him. It is so challenging to inspire him to be a part of the structure in the classroom, however I know that he doesn't mean to be disobedient...he merely doesn't know that directions are to be followed and structures are to be adhered by. And thus, I have to be both immensely tough and very supportive, which is so mentally exhausting that sometimes it is easier to just relax. That is when things go downhill.

Last week was a fantastic week. The struggles that we had with management in our classroom have improved so immensely that we are now finally able to have some fun. Last week during writing, we staged a crime in which a thief crept into our classroom and stole our class pumpkin. We had to play detectives and make lists of "character details" in order to catch the thief! The students were so engrossed in the crime that I hadn't thought ahead of time of the fact that they would not rest until the thief was caught! Therefore I wrote a note to the class that read, " You win LMU! But I'll be back at Thanksgiving...I love turkeys too!" Immediately, they began drafting plans about how to catch the thief at Thanksgiving...now the pressure is on.

It is moments like those that bring the joy, and it is the other kinds of moments that bring the purpose. Moments like the day I found out last week that one of my students, at only 7 years old, is obsessed with visions of death and shootings because of the shots she hears out of her window at night. Truly, I do not know what to say when she approaches me to tell me what she is thinking about. I know that I cannot have her draw them for me with the other students present, so I am at a loss. Still, it is times like these that ground me back into the mission on days like today when one scholar put an open milk container in her backpack and proceeded to drag it all around the classroom. My room is going to smell tomorrow.

Quotes of the Day

"My brother said you wear too much makeup."

"You smell like goldfish crackers."

wake up calls

I have so many wake up calls sounding. There is the one that rings each morning just before the sun, there is the shuffle of feet telling me that my children are here, there is the one that alerts me when things are about to become pandemonium, and there is the one that reminds me each day to remember the lives of my students once they leave the classroom. I have found it easy to forget the realities of the lives of my students and their families, and I must wonder if it is because it is simply easier not to think about it. This week however, the wake up call was made of paper, resting in my hands, telling me exactly what had been so easy to overlook the past four weeks.

This week the parents of my students applied for the free and reduced lunch and breakfast program offered by the Department of Education. It was surprisingly personal information to be passed through my hands, as my eyes were the liaison between the application and the district office. As a result, I now know the income of many of the families in my classroom. It is shocking to discover that the parents of most of my students, with at least one child and in many cases more, make far less money than I do. And I have no one to support but myself, no children, no parents, no debt. Thus sets in the guilt. However this realization instilled within me the greatest levels of admiration for the parents of my students, dispelling so many myths of poverty. Particularly, the myth that parents struggling financially cannot or do not care for their children, as many of the parents of my students demonstrate on a daily basis that they care so deeply about the success of their child.

Still I must wonder, seeing these numbers in front of my eyes, numbers that often were less than half of my monthly salary with four children's names written on the application, how do they have anything? How will they have anything that they need to succeed? Could I have succeeded had I not had so many books in my bedroom or texts and resources in my classrooms? Would I be a great reader if I never had access to books? When I think of those people who blame low income students and communities for low graduation rates, college attendance rates, and test scores, stating that they are 'bad kids' or 'stupid kids' or 'their families don't care about education' I wish that for just a moment they could see what I see and take a moment to reflect upon their own lives and ask themselves the question, "If this were me, where would I be?"

locus of control

It is painfully difficult to admit the things you cannot control. My locus of control is so small and so limited, particularly at this point when there is so much to be done that I cannot think about it all at once. And it is so painfully difficult to come to the conclusion that you have little to no control over the home life of your students. What are you to do, for example, when you know that sending a student home with a negative mark on his behavior log will result in a dark bruise across his cheek? Your first response is most certainly to not send him home with a negative mark on his behavior log, even when he deserves it. But the reality is in fact that you would be lessening his chances for success in his future by holding him to lower expectations than the other children in class. It is a difficult but necessary conclusion that all teachers in my situation must come to: you must send him home with the check mark anyway. No excuses is the policy under which I must operate.

I have a student who used to be my angel. He responded so strongly to positive reinforcement that I would whisper in his ear that he was my personal star and he would be on point for the rest of the day. Suddenly I found bruises on his right arm like someone had grabbed him roughly and his behavior took a 180. He refused to participate or join the community of our classroom, he was disruptive, wrote that he hated himself in his journal, and covered his face with his hood all day. Of course my natural inclination was to reinforce his self-esteem and encourage him gently to rejoin our classroom, but soon the entire class was suffering and the behavior was unacceptable. He went home with another check mark that day. This morning he appeared with a dark purple bruise on his cheek that he told me he got when he hit his face on a slide and his behavior has now done a complete 360. I spent the morning unable to reconcile wanting to be gentle with his feelings when I know that he may need to feel loved with not tolerating his unacceptable behavior in class. Thus, I have no choice but to realize my limited locus of control. I must hold him to the same high behavioral expectations to which I hold all of the other students. Today, he went home with two check marks on his behavior log.

I wrote him a small note after class which I left for him on his desk, encouraging him to bring his positivity back. He crossed out all of my words, including his name, and wrote the name of another student on it. Still, I must remember why I am here and the things that I can change.