1,216.75 Hrs.

I don't know why, but most of my students were exceptionally well-behaved today; I hope whatever happened today continues to happen every day! I know, I know - fat chance!

Today was an early-release day as well as a day without BBL, so it was a pretty easy day. After the students were released from J.A., we spent some time planning for the FCAT pep rally next week, and then I left a little before 5:00 so I could get to church on time for the Ash Wednesday service. Unfortunately, the service was long, and it is now 10:00 and I am still waiting for my dinner to finish so I can eat it and go to bed!

-Aly

1,208.25 Hrs.

Happy Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday!

Since today was Fat Tuesday, I took paczkis into school to share with my R. R. Moton team. Since I only just found out a couple of days ago that most people don't know what they are, I did some research about the paczki and found out that they are Polish and are popular in Poland (obviously), as well as in Michigan. ( Who knew?) A paczki is kind of like a jelly- or custard-filled donut, except that it has a whole lot more calories. They were orginally made on the Fat Tuesday so people could use up all of the things such as sugar and butter that they would not be allowed to use during the next forty days of Lent. I have eaten quite a few during my lifetime in Michigan, and I was delighted to be able to get ahold of a few to share with my team, and they were much appreciated!

The FCAT is in just two short weeks, so things have been coming down to the wire. Everyone at school is stressed out, and I can only imagine how the students are feeling!

-Aly

1,199.25 Hrs.

As I asked just recently - how does time go by so quickly? How is it already Monday again?

Today was a very busy day for me because I had a lot of things to plan and very little time during which I could do that planning. Also, a lot of the people on my team seemed to be having a bad day today, so their emotions kind of wore on me as well. I also had to give one of my students a detention today, which put further unnecessary stress on me. I only like to give out detentions as a last resort since I really do not feel that it is my place to give them (contrary to what the teachers tell me), but I told the student that she would have to have a detention if she talked back to me again, and sure enough, that was enough to provoke one more final sarcastic remark from her and thus earning herself the detention.

I am glad that I was never interested in a career in education, because I really do not think that I am cut out to teach. When a student just stares at me blankly when I am trying to teach him something, I become frustrated if I can think of no other way to explain myself. I lot of times, for things such as the multiplication tables, I only know what I know because I have memorized the information over many years. How many ways can I find to explain to a child that 9 x 9 equals 81? I do always try my best, though.

-Aly

1,181.5 Hrs.

Thursday, I spent most of my day in the office instead of at R. R. Moton. This is because I was preparing today's Daily Briefing. The Daily Briefing (D.B.) is a kind of newsletter that is distributed to the corps at each Friday morning Unity Rally. I was asked to create the DB we used today.

Today, half of the corps, including myself, was supposed to help build with Habitat for Humanity. They actually ended up finishing the house early, though, so today we just helped reorganize their warehouse and store. My team had to sort and move thousands and thousands of hurricane shutters. For those of you from the north who don't know what hurricane shutters are, they are corrugated pieces of thin but sturdy metal that is placed over windows in preparation for a hurricane. Some of them are just made out of tin, but some are made out of steel and are very heavy. My team's job was to sort them into piles according to length, which wasn't very easy since it seemed as every single one had its own unique length. After sorting them, we had to put them nicely back on the shelves. This took us about seven and a half hours, but we were finally able to finish. I have never been so exhausted in my whole life.

I was embarrassed because I was apparently too weak to effectively move the shutters, so I was put on my own "special" project. This project consisted of me picking up all the tiny shutter pieces and putting them into a bucket. : ( That only took me a little while, though, so I made sure to try even harder to be helpful when I went back to the original project! Why am I so pathetic?

Tomorrow is a Young Heroes Saturday, and we will be learning about the influence of drugs and alcohol.

Sunday, I plan to recuperate from the past week and rest up for the week ahead.

-Aly

1,164.25 Hrs.

How do the weeks go by so quickly? How is it already Wednesday again?

My mornings seem so empty now without my first graders. Instead of starting work at 8:45 a.m., I now don't start until 9:30 a.m. (although I still arrive at the school around 7:45). That extra time I am now able to use as planning time.

In one of my small groups today, I was speaking with one of my students who is always goofing off and not paying attention, and she finally confessed to me that she acts the way she does because the work is to hard for her. After promising her that I am here only to help her and that I will help her with anything any time she needs it, her attitude changed drastically for the better. : )

With my first grade small group today, we made flashcards. The kids loved using the markers and notecards! When I was in grade school and college, I made flashcards for EVERYTHING - that was my main study method, and I bought 3x5 cards by the thousands. Now that I am teaching lots of kids and have an extremely limited income, getting ahold of even ten notecards is a luxury! Today, the notecards I was using were provided by the kids' classroom teacher.

The rest of my day was packed since Wednesdays are early-release days and also because this week is one of the weeks we do a BBL lesson.

The kids in my after-school program couldn't stop talking today! I had to yell over them for an entire two hours, and now my throat hurts like crazy.

After work, a couple of my teammates and myself stayed to clean our classroom. What a mess!

-Aly

1,156.75 Hrs.

Going back to work today was easy since I did not have my first graders to wear me out first thing this morning. At the end of the day, my boss was super nice and let me go a minute early, which meant that the public transportation schedule would allow me to get home an hour earlier than if I had left work a minute later than I had.

The best moment of the day today was when one of my students told me that Harriet Tubman invented slaves.

-Aly

1,149 Hrs.

What a day!

My plane took off from the Detroit Metro Airport at 2:30 p.m. today, and I was definitely not ready for my trip to end. I got home around 7:00, and I have been trying to grocery shop, do laundry, clean, and do other various chores and errands since then. I can't believe I have to go back to work tomorrow!

-Aly

1,141 Hrs.

Where have I been for the past few days? Not in Miami-I have been back home in Ann Arbor, Michigan!

My mother's birthday was on Friday, so about three months ago, I bought airplane tickets and planned to surprise my mother by coming home this weekend. And boy, was she surprised! I have no idea how I managed to keep the secret so well, either!

On Thursday, I took the day off of work, and arrived in Detroit around 2:00 p.m. Since then, I have been enjoying myself with friends and family and a very relaxing few days. I even got to see some snow!

I'm not sure that I'm ready to leave for Miami tomorrow, though...

As of today, I have been living in Miami for exactly six months. Six down, four more to go.

-Aly

1,117 Hrs.

Yesterday was the day of one of the FCAT tests for the fourth graders, so things were really tense for the school. Since students at R. R. Moton a lot of times don't do so well on the FCAT tests, everything had to be perfect for them yesterday. This included keeping the school ABSOLUTELY silent, so the CY members were posted outside of the testing rooms as "guards" and peace-keepers. That took up almost all of my morning.

Today was a Wednesday, and was not a rough as most Wednesdays can be. As per our tradition, the other corps members and myself went out to dinner after work; today's dinner was a special "Valentine's version", so we went out to a "romantic" Italian restaraunt and gave each other chocolate and flowers. What fun!

-Aly

P.S. Here is a really cool link you should check out. It is a link to a clip that was on one of the local news stations about City Year Miami's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service we had in January. http://uvu.channel2.org/PublicSite/Video.aspx?id=4063&skin=2

1,103.5 Hrs.

Today, Madeline and I were informed that we will no longer be running first grade intervention as of next week because it is going to be taken over by one of the teachers since the students' grades haven't been improving as they should be. Madeline and I feel badly about this, because we feel as if we have failed at our job. We were told that this is not the reason at all for this happening, but I still can't help but feel a little like I let everyone down.

-Aly

The Beginning of Another Week

Today was pretty relaxing...after church, I did some laundry and other chores around my house, and then I tried to make myself dinner. I burned the food though, so that was kind of disappointing.

-Aly

1,094.75 Hrs.

Yesterday was another LD Day in the office, and gave us time to plan with our teams, meet with our committees, and learn about Black History, health, and the environment. At the end of the day, the corps got together to take a group picture, which I think will turn out to look really cool! Yesterday was a pretty good day because there was very little down time. Usually on Fridays in the office, a lot of the day is spent, I feel, doing absolutely nothing, and I really dislike that about Fridays.

Today was a YH Saturday, and the theme was "Exploring the Elder Generation". Throughout the day, the students learned all about ageism and stereotypes, and hopefully learned a little bit more about what life is like for the elderly. All too often, young people think of the elderly as "slow", "good for nothing", or "lazy", and this is the viewpoint that we tried to change today. For the service portion of the day, some of the time was spent making cards and tissue-paper flowers for residents of an elderly care facility in Miami, and the rest of the time was spent on a "people scavenger hunt". What this meant was that we let the students walk around downtown Miami in hopes that they would meet as many people as possible from a wide range of age groups. What fun!

After YH, I walked to the grocery store for my groceries for the week. I bought myself some items so I coul make eggplant parmesean, which will be the first real cooking I will be doing since moving down here six months ago. I have always been too exhausted or too rushed to cook, but I am really getting tired of macaroni and cheese and frozen pizza!

-Aly

1,077 Hrs.

The weather is chilly in Miami again. In fact, today may have been the coldest day of the year for Miami-37 degrees! Brr!

-Aly

1,068 Hrs.

Today was the most exhausting of all exhausting days because I worked from 8:15 a.m. until 4:45 p.m. without a single break - not even a lunch break. Because the FCAT is starting next week (!), I was teaching kids non-stop today. The hardest parts of the day, I think were the parts where I was transporting students. Kids take a really long time to get anywhere, and since I did not even have breaks in between classes to get to and from each class, I felt that today I was constantly yelling at students to hurry up, stay in line, quiet down, and to not crowd the hallways. Since moving the students took up the majority of my teaching time today, I was hard pressed fit each thirty-minute lesson into approximately fifteen minutes. And at the moment near the end of my day during which I felt the most frazzled because I was late, I had ten kids each yelling for individual help, I was trying to take attendance, and I was had a teacher I was trying to speak with, I had a student hand me an incident report for me to fill out for a student who fell down the stairs and scraped up his shin yesterday during my watch! However, I tried to take it all in stride, and keep heart with the fact that I only have one more day at the school after this, one day at the office, one day with the middle school students, and then I get a day off!

-Aly

1,060 Hrs.

On the inside of all of the metro buses in Miami is an LED marquee that projects the current date and time; I presume they are there for control freaks like myself who like to know exactly how late the bus is making them for their next appointment. Those clocks' accuracy usually amazes, but sometimes they are a little off. Today, I rode a bus that told me it is currently July 11, 1999.

Because of a lack of better things to do, I started to reminisce about what life was like ten years ago. At that time, I would have ten years old and about to enter the fifth grade. Suddenly, the thought struck me that I would have been just like my students are now! Then I started to think about how I sometimes have a really hard time connecting with my students, so I then thought that it might help if I could only remember what life was like for me at that age.

The more I remembered, the more I realized that myself at age ten was absolutely nothing like my students ate age ten. Is that because the World was different ten years ago, or because the world I lived in is so different from the world my students life in? Or is it simply because I was a very unique child???

Here are some things that have not changed:
-Friendships and relationships are the most important things in the World
-Grades and report cards are not really that big of a deal
-Extra attention from adults is something to strive for
-Standing out from the crowd is a bad thing
-Parents are the source of all love, support, and safety-parents who destroy that also destroy the child
-Candy is a massive motivator
-Anything done on a computer is automatically fun
-No thought is given to school work once the bell rings at 3:00
-Appearance is everything
-Every child needs to be praised as often as possible

Here are some things that are different:
-No Myspace or Facebook
-Cell phones were not used for constantly or for cheating during tests
-I never dreamed of punching anyone in the face
-Adults were meant to be obeyed, not doubted
-Everyone I knew (except myself) had a mommy and daddy who were married and raised their children together
-If I didn't eat breakfast in the morning, it was because I was in a hurry to get to school-not because my parents couldn't afford it
-Being able to read by the first grade was a given
-No school uniforms!
-I was never worried about being shot when I left my house
-Guns were only tools that superheroes used

What will this teach me about my children? I am not sure yet.

-Aly

1,050.75 Hrs.

Today was an exhausting day. Maybe because today was the first day off after a week-long "break" from the school? I don't know.

-Aly