Zombies in My School

At my old school, I knew exactly where I would hide if zombies attacked while I was there, or if they attacked and I could get there. I knew I couldn't hide in the apartment I lived in--it was on the ground floor and had a huge sliding glass door through which zombies could pour quite easily. So I settled on the satellite/trailer where I taught at Lehi Junior. There were no windows that wouldn't require climbing that were big enough to crawl in. I could live off of the food and candy in the classrooms. It wouldn't be nutritious, but it would keep me alive. And, if the main hall was breached, I would retreat to the bathroom. It had both a key lock and a bar you could pull across. I would have water and a place to use the bathroom, although, if the water supply was shut off, I would go to the bathroom in the sink because it had a drain and drink from the toilet tank. This would let me live for at least a month or more.

At my new school, the nearest bathroom only locks from the OUTSIDE. Meaning that it would be a good place to lock a rogue zombie, but a bad place to hideout myself. No, at American Fork Junior, the best place to hide in case of zombie attack is the faculty lounge. It has no windows, it locks, contains couches for sleeping, vending machines for a food supply, and has two separate bathrooms. These could be used as sources of water a final retreat since they are an additional locked door.

Anyway, I need to go enter grades.

Happy

Today I am overwhelmed by awesomeness. Today I get to go to the wedding of one of my best friends since the fifth grade. That puts us at about 13 years of friendship. I've told all 250 of my students just how very excited I am for today. Then, on top of that, I just read her blog and found out that she got a job and is probably moving to Salt Lake City soon. I can't even express how happy I am.

So, despite having to teach the Holocaust this week, today is pretty much the best day ever. Ever. Ever.

Catch-up

Although I definitely have more time during my summers, and although I am up and about and doing things worth blogging about, I never seem to blog. Oh, I have two or three drafts of blogs I never finished, but nothing concrete to show you. So, as I get ready for the rush of fall, today I will post a partly pictorial summary of summer. It will be long, but think of it as an entire summer worth of blogs condensed into one mega-blog.

First things first. School ended, and I left for Island Park with Allie and Rachel. Oh, and I was a blonde at the time.

When I came back, Cuny and I decided that we should road trip to Tucson for the heck of it, and also for a friend's birthday. We did this despite both being sick at the time. While we were there, Cuny got REALLY sick, and we spent all night in urgent care.

Less than six hours after returning from Tucson, I left for Ohio to spend two and a half weeks with my nieces and nephews and my brother and his wife. This was the longest I've ever gotten to hang out there, and I loved every day of it. We fixed chili and rice, went to the skate park and the pool, and played way to many card games. And I became a flaming red head.

After my time in Ohio, I headed to Indiana for a few days to spend time with my sister and her husband, whom I hadn't seen in forever. We went shopping and watched movies and world cup soccer and hung out and talked for hours. My sisters really are some of my best friends.

When I came home I stayed for only a week, long enough to meet with teachers from my new English department and plan some curriculum,skateboard, go to Cuny's family reunion, and chop all my hair off. Then I ran home for the weekend with Rachel to spend the fourth of July with Dad and to be there when my nephew got sealed to my brother and his family. Well, of course I mean to wait outside and babysit while my nephew got sealed to my brother and his family, but that just means that I got to read my book while the next nephew in line took a nap. And then we spent half an hour playing with a tape measure. Good times.

When I got back from Idaho, Cuny and I spent our time skateboarding. Seriously. Nearly every day. We canvassed parks from Salt Lake to Springville and had a marvelous time. We had packing to skating down to an art--including refrigerated water bottles and tupperware full of watermelon and carrots and humus for our ravenous, post-skateboarding tummies. This is also the span of time when I finally caved and spent $300 on a wii and wii games and wii accessories. I should regret this purchase, but I don't. I've had way to much fun on that thing for the rest of this summer to regret it. The only regret is that I only have two controllers, and that my wii will probably continue to suck money out of my purse in the form of new games and accessories for quite some time. Oh, and I died my hair a sort of purple/black. This also seems to be the part of the summer where I stopped taking pictures. Hmmm. Oops.

Then, Cuny and I went backpacking in Yellowstone National Park for three days. Romantic, right? Add my parents. Oh, and throw in my high school band director for good measure. And then fill the air with millions of frenzied mosquitoes and grape-sized flies. This backpacking trip will remain one of the most fun and beautiful I've been on, but not necessarily the most relaxing. The mosquitoes were so bad that we couldn't stop to rest on the trail, or sit down to eat our meals. We had to keep moving, and even then we walked in little buzzing clouds. At every meal we would fish between one and five mosquitoes out of our cups as the meal progressed. There was refuge only in the tents, where the first five minutes would be spent in cold-blooded murder of the tiny vampires that had followed us in. But, even with the mosquitoes, it was wonderful. We hiked over 30 miles in three days and saw hot springs and waterfalls and sunrises and moose and bison and meadows stretching away like lakes. Not only that, but at the end a day and ten long miles, I had someone there to give me a foot-rub! We wore him out though, you can tell. Pictures of this trip were stolen from Cuny's facebook.

After the trip, I stayed home for two days. Then I went back up to Idaho to go camping with my parents and Rachel, my brother Aaron and his family, my brother Jared and his family, and a friend from Germany. I loved getting to see all of my family this summer, every sibling and every niece and nephew. Especially because a few of them seem to share my penchant for playing multiple games of monopoly in the course of a day. I knew there were other people like me out there, I just had to wait a few years for them to be born into my own family and get old enough to play.

Finally, I returned home to my long abandoned apartment and my much neglected roommate and my long-suffering boyfriend. Since returning home I have skateboarded like crazy, hitting parks as far away as Park City, and begun to panic about my classroom. You see, today is the 15th of August, and I have all day meetings for school starting in five days, and students coming in nine days. However, my classroom is still under construction. You could see why this is making me edgy. I've taken to going into school two or three times a week and getting the newest updates on my room and the expected completion date. A teacher without a classroom is a lot like a pirate without a ship, or a crab without a shell, or a book without a cover, or a flea without a dog. They (the principals and custodians) tell me I should get in my classroom on Wednesday. (They say this with a hopeful look on their faces. I can tell if that's because my getting into my classroom by Wednesday is a pipe dream, or if they're just hoping I don't get mad because I can't get in yet.)

So that pretty much brings my life up to the present day. The only thing more to say is that I have, at long last, learned to drop in. If you don't know anything about skateboarding, that means nothing to you, but it has come to mean the world to me. It means that I have taken a tangible step toward not being a beginning skater. It means that all sorts of things I couldn't even think of doing before are now open to me. Basically it means I'm awesome. I will try and post some pictures of what dropping in looks like so you can appreciate how truly amazing I am. Oh, and I have dark brown hair. For the moment.

Into limbo

Yesterday was our school's yearbook day. It was one of the most stressful days I've been through all year. As yearbook advisor, I had to coordinate the distribution of over a thousand yearbooks (all individually checked for quality) to more than a thousand students in dozens of classes. Each book is labeled with the student's name and placed in a box for his or her class. For weeks we've been typing labels and organizing books. Without going into too many details, yesterday had me seriously thinking I should go blow the stipend I received for being yearbook advisor on something crazy, because I had just earned it. Big time.

Because I've been pushing so hard to get all the final projects graded, the yearbooks out, etc., I have given very little thought to moving out of my room. Finally, yesterday afternoon, after losing my patience, my temper, and my sanity, I staggered back to my room, thinking that I would take the rest of the day to get caught up and to figure out how I was going to do this moving thing. As I opened the door to my classroom I gasped in surprise. There would be no respite, no afternoon of getting caught up, no leisurely moving things out. My back counter was already piled up four feet high with boxes the teacher who will have this classroom next year had moved in while I was dealing with the yearbook.

So here I am today, taking the posters off my walls and reflecting over the past two years at Lehi Jr. Most of these posters I hung less than a week before school started my first year of teaching. In many ways, this classroom feels an awful lot like home. I've spent so many hours sitting at my desk, covering it with papers, uncovering it bit by bit, entering grades, teaching, talking to students. I still remember the blog I wrote about the first time I saw my classroom. I still have the series of pictures I took as I decorated it step-by-step. Now, as I look around, it looks like someone is playing that slideshow backwards.

Disassembling this place feels like going back in time. More than once, after taking down a poster or flag I remembered that the reason I had hung it in that spot was to cover up a hole in or stain on the wall. Now my desk is like an island, still covered in papers, the little flower pot, and with the stapler, tape dispenser, and tissues at the ready. All around it, my classroom is turning into a barren and increasingly unfamiliar space. Who knew that classrooms were such blank spaces? Spaces that could be filled with an incredible amount of personality and life with just a few colored bits of paper and cloth and the collective experience of the hundreds of students who have come through this room in the last few years. And who knew that all of that personality and shared experiences could be simply wiped away like the notes from my students I cleaned off of my white board this morning?

To make matters even more disorienting, I'm moving out without moving on. The classroom I will be in at my new school is going to be remodeled this summer, and no one knows where it will be or when I will have access to it. So I am moving all of this stuff, so useless outside of a classroom, into Allie's and my spare bedroom. Next week I will turn in the seven keys I have to different doors around this school and receive none to replace them. And while my pocket will feel lighter and more carefree without their considerable weight, I think I will also be somewhat homeless until there are at least few to replace them.

Well, I've run out of things to say and time to type. Don't let my current yearbook-hangover fool you, I think this transfer will be just fine. But cleaning out my classroom while the next teacher slowly piles her things in the corner (she's brought in three more cart loads today) makes me feel like my life here is already ended, even though the last day of school isn't until tomorrow. Somewhere yesterday, Miss E., the 8th grade English teacher at Lehi Jr. died, and I'm just her ghost, a faded spectre shuffling about my "unfinished business" while the living busily and cheerfully move into the vacant space my life once occupied.

Confession

I can't help it. I know I should be more patient with him. I know that he doesn't limit his attention span to twelve seconds on purpose. I know he doesn't mean to disrupt class by coming in late, talking, whining, and sighing so loud I can hear it clearly over everything else. I know he doesn't intend to be one of my most annoying and frustrating students. I know that I have to give him extra patience, so I know that I shouldn't take out my frustration at not being able to punish him when he's a pain on him. I know that I should be even more loving and patient and understanding since he just got back to school after being gone for a month because he fell off a cliff and landed on his face over spring break. I know he had extensive reconstructive surgery on his face, and am daily reminded of it by the scars stretching across one side. I know that his nose could quite possibly break if bumped at all. I know he's even more scatterbrained and stressed because he's behind in all his classes from his time in the hospital. I know that for naturally active person with a 12 second attention span, being unable to play basketball and horse around must be an agony of torture, reducing his attention span and usually sparse impulse control even further.

Still, after the tenth time he had blatantly interrupted my class "on accident" in the first fifteen minutes of fourth period, the reason my anger didn't boil over, and the only reason I faced the class with a delighted smile as I turned away, was because I, accidentally, for the briefest of milliseconds, imagined punching him in his fragile, reconstructed nose.

That probably makes me a bad person. But hey, I didn't yell at him like I was about to, right?

Mother's Day Tribute

When I was 18, I got my first official “boyfriend.” I was giddy and happy about it, until I realized that having a boyfriend was usually public knowledge. And while I didn’t mind the people at school or all my friends or, heck, even the teachers knowing, I wasn’t so sure about my parents. As I thought about it, I realized I didn’t even know if I was “allowed” to have a boyfriend in high school. Everyone else’s parents seemed to have clear rules on these types of things, but it had never been an issue for me before, so I had never asked my parents about it. Not to mention, when you’re 18 and beginning your first official relationship since the fifth grade, telling your parents is an agony of awkward. I considered not telling them at all, but they were bound to notice unless I actively hid it from them, and I didn’t want to have to sneak around in my real relationship, especially when there was nothing they could possibly disapprove of in this relationship—except, perhaps, its existence…

I decided to test the waters with Mom. One day, as we were driving back from somewhere, I said with pretend innocence, “Mom, what would you do if I got a boyfriend?” This was supposed to give the information I needed without disclosing any on my part.

I think I can count the number of times I’ve fooled my mother on one hand. This wasn’t one of them. “Why? What boy do you think highly enough of to make your boyfriend?” I was caught red-handed.

Besides reading minds, my mother has several magical abilities, and it would take a book to list them all. For instance, I’m fairly sure that she has visions. I don’t mean the in the Joseph Smith and Nephi kind of way, although I’ve never asked her, but visions nonetheless. Frequently these visions were a source of confusion and extra hard work for me. When she decided to plant bushes and trees all along the edges of our lawn, and sent my sister out to plant and weed and whine about it, I grumbled about “Mom’s projects.” When we tore up the lawn to install a sprinkling system, I thought it’d never recover. When she decided, years later, to plant MORE TREES along the edges of the field, and sent me out to weed and whine again, I grumbled about “Mom’s projects.” When she decided to rip off one side of the house and throw everything into confusion by remodeling, I thought it was fun, but crazy. But, it turns out the Mom has visions. She can see the future. She looked into the future and saw how beautiful our house and lawn could be and then spent years gradually turning vision into reality. She did the same thing with our cabin, and she does the same thing with nearly everything she touches.

Ask her to plan a family reunion, and, before you know it, you are sent off to help take care of bits and pieces you don’t understand until you see the final product. And that’s another thing she taught me, visions require hard work and planning, sometimes years of it. But more important than being aware of the work involved, she has shown me, on countless occasions, not to be afraid of it. So what if it means upsetting the just-fine status quo? So what if that’s a project that will stretch for years? So what if you don’t know the first thing about what you’d like to do when you begin? All of that can be dealt with, and I’ve watched Mom do it countless times to prove it. She taught me to dream big, and to dream creatively, and to not limit my dreams to things that feel safe and easy.

Now, when I want to try new things, things that seem foreign to my experience, or even to the idea of “Eve” that I saw for myself, I don’t spend much time freaking out. Last year, when I was asked to take over the yearbook and make a good looking product from scratch without much training or instruction and a staff of fifteen 14-15 year olds and sell it to a thousand of their peers, I could say “ok.” When I decided I needed a new hobby, I wasn’t afraid to try something completely different. When I was told I would be moving schools and teaching more classes and starting from scratch again, I didn’t waste time grieving and moping. I remembered Mom, and everything she’s taught me about opportunity and work. When you need to create a yearbook, you do it, whatever it takes. When you need to change schools against your will, you make it work and make it work well. Mom has taught me not to be afraid of change, voluntary or un-. Her example gives me courage, hope, and determination.

I think Mom had a vision for the type of home she wanted, one in which anyone would be welcome, and her children would rather bring their friends there than leave. A home full of good places to take naps, curl up with a book, or sit talking with siblings and parents. I know that I am only aware of the tiniest percentage of how much planning, effort, and vision that took to create, but the result is that we all love our home, and we all love being there. When I bring friends home for the first time, they always say something about the atmosphere of our home.

There are so many things I have learned from Mom, so many memories of things she taught me. When I set out to write this, I had a list of five or ten that I had to cover. I’ve made it through two so far. My mom is someone whom I look up to, whom I respect and love and admire more than I know how to express. As I do this “growing-up” thing that I’m doing, I’m beginning to piece together my own vision of the future. It’s a vision of who I want to be, and I know I will spend the rest of my life working it into a reality. That vision looks an awful lot like my mom.

Mommy--Wow! I'm a big girl now!

I would just like to take this moment to broadcast to the world that I, for the first time in a very, very long time, just voluntarily cleaned the bathroom. No one made me do it. No one assigned me the chore, threatened me with a cleaning check, or in anyway hinted that my bathroom was past due. In fact, since I've only lived here for a couple of weeks, by college standards my bathroom was still quite shiny clean.

Nevertheless, this morning I woke up, walked to the store, bought my very own cleaning chemicals, carried them home in a reusable grocery bag, and then cleaned the whole darn thing. All by 9 a.m. Go me!