Thursday Thoughts

Dang. I missed Wednesday and the HodgePodge. Ah well, story of my life.  Maybe next week. So today instead of a hodgepodge, you get random Thursday Thoughts.

On Failure
I saw a meme the other day that said something like "It wasn't wasted time if you learned something". It reminds me of the failures I've accomplished.  I'd rather call them near-wins. A few weeks ago, I interviewed for a dream job. Great location, work I would love, and a place G would love to live. I came in second place.  At first I was feeling pretty low; it's hard not getting what I want.  Second place is first loser, right? And when I say "at first" I really mean "for a week".  But then I reconsidered. Five years ago, I never would have even applied for that job. I almost got it.  So I'm going to keep trying. I'm ok where I am, and I love teaching English - it seems to be its own reward. But I'll keep trying.  I've got another publication next month, and I'll keep writing. These things are key. I have a really nice acquaintance who just took his sommelier test.  He did great on theory and some other part of the test, but not as well on the blind tasting. So he didn't make it this time.  The cool things in my opinion from a distance since I'm not affected are that he took the test in the test in the first place, that he'll know more for next time, and that lots of people supported him getting there.  That test is expensive, and I bet if he crowd funds it again, he'll get even more support. Because there is no doubt in in my mind that I can reach my dreams and that he can reach his too.  You should see what he does in his community, to help fight hunger and homelessness. We nearly won, both of us. I'll try again if you do, buddy.

On Names
My blogger buddy, Nonnie's Random Thoughts, made a comment about all the names I use. I like my monikers but realize that they can be confusing. I get confused sometimes myself. So just so you know.... Antoinette and Mindie are both legal names. My last name is also real if you know what it is. And yes, it's French and yes, I know what it means. My immediate family calls me Mindie, with the exception of one niece who playfully refers to me as "Anti-Onette" since I am her aunt. In my professional life, I also use Mindie. However, many of my friends and all of Gs family call me Antoinette. I prefer that name.  It helps me online to differentiate between professional and personal writing. I like Antoinette for my blog and I like the way it sounds when said out loud. As for my blog- I'm a Wild Okie, but since I've moved back home to Washington, I'm much more idle and find myself in an idyllic, pastoral setting.  Hence, Idyll Wild. They're all me. I like the idea of playing with identity and online presentation of self. Not in a false way, but in a multi-faceted way.

September 11 and Emotionally Charged Dates
Today is September 11th, the anniversary of the attacks. I have a hard time writing about events I am emotionally invested in, and they are often not timely discussions. Today I'm going to try to speak frankly about this.
I was teaching Organic Chemistry labs at Oklahoma State University the morning of the attacks. I didn't have cable and didn't know about the events until I got to school.  My first thought, after the shock, was "those poor people".  My second thought was "I'm in Oklahoma. I hope nobody retaliates against my Muslim friends for this."  Maybe that's terrible, and Oklahomans are generally nice people, but when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building, some yahoos shot up the local mosque. They had childcare there you know. A playground enclosed around a fence and all, so it's not like the perps didn't know.  OSU was/is a big oil and petroleum research school, and lots of students come from Arabic speaking countries to study before taking their knowledge home to the petroleum fields.  Since this is a span of years, they bring their families. Many of the women wore conspicuous burkas, abayas, and hair coverings after their custom.  I talked to all of my non-white friends and cautioned them to lay low. If there was backlash in our community, I was unaware. My friends and their friends were all ok.
I was vehemently against beginning a war on such flimsy premises. Not that what happened was minimal at all- and devastating and changing and harmful to the American people.  We lost our innocence that day, as a nation. People at the university were against war too, but that didn't stop us as a nation from exacting revenge in an ongoing war that we're not even close to cleaning up. Nobody wins in war. Hurting a whole people because they hurt you. I don't know.  And each person killed sent a ripple we are still feeling; a feeling that will be carried through our generations.  To live in such times, to lose the feeling of security, of trust in our own government as they passed a thick Patriot Act and created Homeland Security, to have our own government take away our freedoms in the name of security. I'm not sure it was the right thing. It was also the day I stopped being able to believe things on the news.
I don't even know that I'm right about this. I can't take my thoughts and memories out of context and so they are jumbled.

Insomnia
I have insomnia, the kind that lets me go to sleep but won't let me get back to sleep.  It's been crazy the last few months, since the funding was cut for my last position.  Worrying has always been a hobby anyway.  I do the regular things- cutting out electronics before bed, good exercise, eating well, avoiding caffeine after 2 p.m. I sometimes do gentle yoga before bed and take Benadryl intermittently so that I can get a good night's sleep. My cat wakes me up between 2:30 and 4 for a drink of water and some food. If I don't get up and do this, she's often throwing up half an hour later. At 18, Eleanor takes a lot of medicine for her little tummy, her thyroid and her arthritis.  I'll pretty much do anything to keep weight on her and I'm sure that doesn't help with my sleep cycles.  Sometimes she wakes me up just hopping up to cuddle and many is the time I wake up to find her snuggled next to me.  Last night though, last night I went to Nirvana got a good night's sleep. After two days of very little, I zonked out for almost 9 hours. I'm feeling pretty great today! Eventually, this will calm down. I'll get back into my daily routine since I've been off work for the last two weeks, and all will be well.

School
I'm looking forward to school starting. I love fall and I love teaching Freshmen.  I know this isn't a popular thing to say, but getting a bunch of kids fresh from high school in their first days of independence is awesome.  They'll try anything. They want knowledge. They'll voice opinions and sometimes learn things they didn't know.  Teaching literature even to older students gives me the same feeling.  Humility. I feel small and honored to have a place in the growth and development of others and I often learn just as much as they do. Teaching makes me want to be a better person.

That's it.  That's all my thoughts today.  I need to get back to creating syllabi and planning daily activities for the next 10 weeks. And I'm going to make time to take pictures of autumn in the Northwest, whatever form that may take.

Finals/Finally

Hi Everyone-
A quick and rather frantic post as I wait for a student to meet with me about her grade.

Sooooo- it's finals week.  On top of 4 classes I need to grade essays/grade finals/enter grades, I've also got a huge report due before next Monday.  No pressure.  Once Monday hits, life will be much slower paced than it is now.  Knock on wood.

That's because I'm moving to another job in the university.  I'm going to have to move offices, which I can't think about right now because I'll burst into tears.  I don't want to leave my beloved office mates. They were the first people to welcome me to Ellensburg and they were my first friends here.  We are all very thoughtful of one another- and we have a great dynamic.  Not something you always see in a big office full of women.  The upside is that I'm moving.....to the LIBRARY!!  Yes, the Library where they keep the books.  I'm excited about that.  Corner office, nice windows. I won't be a librarian (I'm not THAT good), but my new job will entail creating a real online tutoring presence for the university and I'm tied to groups that are also housed in the building.  I'll start after spring break, which is next week. I'll still get to teach, just not as many classes.

I'm also finally getting over my cold and sinus infection.  I went to the doctor this week and she said as much, but that I keep coughing and having a hard time sleeping because my lungs are really weak from the illness.  Since I'm a moderate asthmatic, she insisted I take a round of Prednisone.  Pred makes me edgy and restless. I don't sleep as well. I told her I'd take and I am reluctantly doing so- only because we leave for vacation on Monday and I want to be well.

Vacation- we're going to Louisiana to visit G's family. Well, my family now too. We haven't seen them in person, outside of FaceTime, since we moved to Washington. Lots of things have changed! We will finally get to meet our new niece, HK.

So fair warning: lots of pictures will ensue.  I'll put up more on my Instagram account than I put here and they'll load there first.

Off for more adventures!

Pretty Well Settled

I had 12 students show up all week for lunch detention.  We finished Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and all present agreed that it was the best book that they had ever read.  Six girls, six boys.  Most of them are low-level readers.  I am so happy.  Sometimes other teachers pop in at lunch just to behold the sight of these kids and I engrossed in our book and happily munching on cafeteria fare.  Some of these kids believe they will never be good readers.  Some of them don't follow the book so much as listen to my narration. That's ok too and that's also why I read it out loud.  They are interested in stories and in this book.  Every day they tell someone who was absent what is going on. It's normal and natural and this, I believe, is the way to encourage literacy. This part of the day is what reminds me why I got into teaching.  The big question is "What are we going to read next?!".  I offered the other Alexie book, Flight, and also The Hunger Games.  They picked Flight.  I'm not sure how they will like it since the story line is much different than the first book, so I offered to keep Hunger Games as a backup in case we decide to abandon the book.  I also tweeted Sherman Alexie to let him know how much we loved the book.

My regular classes are going well.  My 8th graders- cynical as they are- are just finishing and enjoying The Outsiders.  They like it and have done a good job so far.  They are impatient with reading and resist doing more than a chapter a day.  We are working on the attention span. I'm not sure if they know that part of it. Next up is Walter Dean Myers.  While Alexander Nazaryan may decry the usefulness of Myers, and insist that students would benefit more from Homer and Aristophanes, I advocate first getting children interested in reading.  Yes, perhaps Lysistrata with its overt sexual humor and Martial's epigrams are somehow elevated to high art and of benefit to readers, they can't get there from here.  I'm scaffolding.  Perhaps at the end of the year, as a reward. But until then, until my students understand how to approach a reading at all, I want them to learn to enjoy learning how to do that and Myers can help us farther along with his accessible language and stories that my students can identify with.

My 7th graders, having just finished up with an expository writing unit, are now eager to return to literature. They are perusing Virginia Hamilton novels and will seen become engrossed in the stories of early African Americans.  And for me, I have offered a school-wide initiative to help us get on the same page with vocabulary.  I'm selecting a word every week for the school, and we are putting it up on the marquis.  Then the word, definition and an example will be read every day with the morning announcements and the other teachers will join in to help reinforce the lesson.  I like it, overall. The faculty are seemingly behind the idea as well so we'll see how that pans out.  The first week was a success.

I have had some trouble with the construction.  I've had bronchitis twice since it began. I was sick over the whole holiday and have had to stop running.  Let me say that again: I had to stop running for the time being.  Running is how I stay in shape and it's how I keep my asthma in check. I cannot and should not be exposed to a dangerous work environment and I tried pretty hard to ignore or deny the implications.  But my last trip to my doctor- where he advised me to find a different job while giving me a steroid shot in the butt- that made me see the light.  The remodeling is going on all around us, and all precautions have been taken.  We are stuck with just dealing with the dust, mold and noise.  And probably some asbestos too.  There was a public meeting to address health problems for students and faculty and the companies told us we would need to transfer. That's what the environmental officer said, anyway. I met with my principal and we decided that if I can't get someone in one of the adjoining buildings to trade with me, he will transfer me to another school.  I'm just getting going in this school; why would I want to switch in the middle of the year? I feel as though I am part of things there and part of the force that will get us past the CRT gatekeepers at the end of the year. I'll keep you posted, but it's most important to be able to breathe and I'd rather just work with people rather than any litigious entities.

But what about my kids? Where can they go? How can they even know to ask?  To be continued...

Not a Morning Person

It's ten o'clock and I'm wide awake. Ten at night. I could stay up until 1 or 2 and be happy about it. I only need 7.5 hours of sleep a night, so my natural cycle is to sleep from about 1 until about 8:30 and sometimes 9 a.m. I have always been this way.

I remember as a young girl always having trouble waking in the mornings and going to sleep at night. Maybe that's everyone; I don't know. I grew up without digital props. We played outside in the sunshine and rain and snow and tried to stay out of our mother's hair or there wasn't anyone home anyway, so we'd ride bikes in the afternoon. Or we'd hang out and talk or play games. My sisters taught me to play chess and card games and I read like a fiend. But mostly, I just played.

It was worse as a teenager because my mom was the night dispatcher at the local police department. She worked midnight to 8 a.m. and I left for school at 8:15. We'd have a cup of coffee after she came home and before I left for school. I would stay up very late at night and read books, sometimes so late that I'd skip school until noon the next day to catch up. Back in the day, school started promptly at 8:30 and we stayed until 3:25. It was difficult to stay awake during those morning classes. I don't remember anything that was said or taught until after lunch. Of course, after lunch was Ag shop, English and whatever business class Mr. Moore was teaching.

I took jobs that required my presence after 9 a.m.- a job as a telephone operator, a bartender, a desk clerk at a hotel. I've done a lot of crappy jobs. I did for awhile have to be at work at 7:30 in the morning when I worked as a secretary in Las Vegas. And later when I was at a veterinary hospital, it was 7:45. Who gets up that early?

If I have to be someplace before say, 9 a.m., there are a few things you can bank on. One is that I won't be beautiful unless I'm presenting or teaching something. So no makeup, no pretty hair and definitely not a lot of smiling. I'm pretty much a zombie until around 9. I'm lucky that my teeth get brushed and that I'm wearing clothes. The clothes don't always match. Just saying. I teach in the afternoons and evenings and take classes after 4:30 p.m. Sometimes my teaching and school day ends at 10 p.m. For some, that's a hardship. For me, that's life. I like it better in the summer because of the heat, but even in winter I like to sleep in, snuggled into warm quilts with an aging and mercurial cat to keep me warm.

Having said that, it must be quite entertaining for my statistics professor to deal with me these last few weeks. The class begins at 8. In the morning. And lasts until 1. Five hours of statistics is bad enough, but really? Five hours a day, five days a week for a month? Why did I sign up for kamikaze statistics? Because if I do this and also finish the qualitative research course, I can take my comprehensive exams in the Fall with my regularly scheduled six hours of classes and the 18 hours that I will be teaching. Because I'm sort of kamikaze as a student.

I roast my own coffee these days. A good guy named R.E. Davis gave me his old roaster so I can do so easily, and I buy green coffee beans locally. And this morning, I got up late and didn't get a chance to make coffee. Crazy because it only takes four minutes. One minute to burr grind and three to run water through the Bunn- I've got more money tied up in coffee than some people put into their cars. I corrected the kid at Starbucks counter the other day. Don't fuck with me, junior. I have been economically supporting this company since before you were born.
Anyway, I got up late and threw on some clothes and put a hat on my head and ran out the door. It's faster to ride my scooter because I can park closer to the building, so off I went. I mentally patted myself on the back for brushing my teeth. Come 8:45, I was nodding off. This has happened before, but I'm not usually on the front and center row with the good professor lecturing to me and my fellow compatriots in what sometimes seems like tongues. I could see his face clearly, there were words coming from lips and I'm sure I must've looked like I was on a bad acid trip from staring so hard, trying to figure out what the hell he was saying.

I had to do something; I wouldn't want him to think that I don't care about the class. I really do, which is a problem. I need to know the stuff he's teaching us. It helps with critical thinking skills and analyzing data from studies that I often read. If I don't comprehend this, I will take it over again. So I did what everyone does: I pretended I was sniffling and went to the bathroom to try to wake up.

I've got to make it through this week and two more just like it. If I ever hoped to be a morning person, this cures me of any notion that I will ever be so. Here it is, 10:45, and I am still awake and need to get up at 6:30 tomorrow. I've got the original vampire book, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and maybe I'll take a look at it for a bit before nodding off. And I'll roast up a small batch of Nicaraguan for unweldling my eyes tomorrow. Oh morning, why do you vex me so?