Days Like These: Flash Fiction and Improv

It was one of those rare "good days" at school today. Don't get me wrong, I love my students, but some days are definitely harder than others. Thankfully, today was not one of them!! It's the last week of school before Christmas break which means two things for me as a teacher:

1) Lots of big assignments due (meaning I can't assign homework)
2) Distracted kids thinking about Christmas

The temptation is to relax, have a party, and put on a movie for the kids. At least they'll sit quietly through 50 minutes of Elf, right? Wrong!! As anxious as I was for the semester to finally be over, I've been very reluctant to do a free-for-all just because it's the last week of school. I wanted to make the most of our short time together and do something fun and slightly educational (but mostly fun). Thus: 55ers and Improv Games.

In 8th grade writing, I showed the students how to write very brief pieces of fiction called 55ers in which a story is communicated in exactly 55 words (excluding the title). It is truly an art form and much more difficult than it sounds! But the students were up to the challenge. I plan to take the students' pieces and compile them into a booklet to give them on Thursday. Here's the one I wrote, inspired by this goofy picture:

A Tribute to ChildhoodRunning barefoot through the woods withBlackberry scratches and violet-dyed mouths.Buckets brimming with plump purple berries they are too delicious to resist.“Stop eating them all, or we won’t have enough for cobbler!” Mother warns. Those were the best days. Little did we know how quickly they were slipping through our tight-fisted, purple-stained fingers.

Even just rereading it makes me feel a little nostalgic! I was so proud of the 8th graders for jumping right in to the task! From what I've read so far, their stories are excellent!

In seventh grade, I taught the students the art of asking good open-ended questions using the 5Ws+H (who, what, when, where, why, and how). "These will be crucial to the game we're playing today." The game in question is an improv game called "Expert Interview" in which the audience is allowed to ask questions of the "expert." Meanwhile, I MC-ed the session to keep things from getting out of hand. Visiting our classroom today, we had a carniverous plant expert, a pirate linguist, a professional cat bather, an excuse maker, a dumpster diver, and two other experts one on interpreting apocalyptic weather patterns, the other on traditional Czechoslovakian Polka dance. As you can imagine, much hilarity and laughter ensued and all left the classroom with a smile on their face, including myself. 

Truly, it's days like these that make teaching one of the most creative, inventive and rewarding things I've ever done.

Published Article!

Check it out! Yours truly wrote an article for the CollegePlus blog!! ^-^ CP has been gracious enough to me to send a few writing projects my way over the course of my time with them and this is one of them! I am so grateful for all the writing practice! This one features 9 "bad" reasons for going to college and it was a fun one to write! I think the most challenging part though was balancing the cheerfulness of the CP brand with the sarcasm of the article's content. It went through several major revisions and finally, we are pleased with the balance.

Let it Snow!

This weekend, instead of planning my lessons like I should have been doing, I helped Mom make decorations for our caroling party on the 20th. We threaded cotton balls and pompoms on white thread and fishing line and hung from the ceiling to make "snow" in our living room! Eventually, we will hang up the strands in our church foyer, but in the meantime, this was our test run. It looks so magical!! I'm really starting to feel the Christmas spirit!!

Interacting with Iraqis

LtoR: Me, D, and L.

Strange smells wafted from the pot-luck buffet of hot plates arranged across the counter. Peppers and tomato sauce and sweet fruits and foreign combinations of seasonings. At the end of the line are the sweets. Some kind of nut--like a large almond coated in a sweet outer layer with little... bumps? horns? Beside the almonds is a bowl of small round balls. They crunch into a fine powder between my teeth like cocoa pebbles, but not as sweet and only the barest hint of chocolate. I load a few more dolmas on my plate and head for the living room.

Their language is melodic and beautiful and unlike anything I've ever heard. They correct me when I try to pronounce their names the right way. After four times or so, they say, "You can just call me Rana. It's easier that way." I feel bad that I cannot pronounce the hidden syllables or even remember the easier English-ified versions of their names by the end of the night. But there is only one of me, and so many more of them. "You'll get it with time." my mentor Sandi reassured me. Most of them have lived in America that they speak English well enough--especially the children in school--but they still turn to one another from time to time and speak in their own private tongue.

This semester, I've been branching way far out of my comfort zone in more ways than one! Sandi and her husband Tom invited me over to their house to meet their Muslim friends from Iraq. Not knowing what to expect, I went. And I went a second time, and a third time. Their group is called "People of Peace" (or POP) and they try to meet a couple times a month. They've been building bridges with these Iraqi refugees for over five years and the families are all very close.

Every time I hang out with them, it's different. At my first meeting, everyone recited poetry (some original some not) and even the children participated. The next meeting was held at a different location and a few others I hadn't met showed up. A girl named Nora (??) told me about a Chinese folk tale she was reading at school and we talked about peacemakers in the past. On the day after Thanksgiving, we held our own Thanksgiving to welcome a new Iraqi family to America. I tried my hardest to learn all seven of the children's names, but now I can only remember three! Maybe it'll stick the next time I see them. They don't speak as much English so one of our friends translated. We'll hear their story, bit by bit, just like the others before I came. But for now, I guess I'll have to learn some Arabic or just try to transcend the barrier with the language that everyone understands: a smile.

An Attitude of Grattitude

Things I am Thankful For:

• the week off from school
• Christmas carols
• cool weather and warm kitchens
• time to read books
• new and old friendships

A rare non-blurry picture of Cameron!

I'll confess that I was not very Thankful this thanksgiving. To be even more honest, I didn't even think about the things I was grateful for. I'm not sure why I was such a rain cloud on the most thankful day of the year so I won't even attempt to explain it. I was so ashamed of my bratty attitude that I don't even mention it when people ask me how my Thanksgiving was. "It was good!" I chirp instead.

And it was. I have no right to complain. I helped my parents around the kitchen and watched snippets of the Thanksgiving parade whenever Cameron called me into the other room. The weather was warm and I decorated the tables. As usual, we invited a bunch of friends over from church and pot-lucked the traditional evening meal. Apart from my gloomy, selfish disposition, it was a lovely day. I can only hope to redeem myself next year with a better attitude.

Art Class Photo-Progression

One of my early sketches

 When I walked into the first art class at Tucson Parks and Rec, I wasn't sure what to expect. I wasn't expecting the teacher to tell me to "just draw" for three hours with the still-lifes she had set up. But that's what I did for the first two weeks. I think I expected her to give some sort of mini-lecture and then give us the opportunity to practice it. Instead, she wandered around the room, commenting on people's drawings or works in progress that they'd brought. When she got to my table, she said, "Oh you're a very good drawer..." and meandered away, leaving my alone for the rest of the class. 

Big Bites: A Reflection On Time

Sonya Langeford via Unsplash, used under CC0 license

When I graduated from college, I thought my free time would grow exponentially. After all, studying was what took up all of my time, but if you took that away, then it follows that I would naturally have more free time for whatever pursuits my heart desires, right? Wrong.

Even over that first summer, I noticed that I didn't feel much change in the amount of free time I had/wanted to do things like reading, painting, and dancing. It was filled up with other things--soccer (plus practices), meeting up with friends and mentors, and of course spending time with Jake. As fall approached and my career path gained more definition, my time was even more consumed by my work. Believe it or not, lesson planning can take a long time!

These days, my week looks like this
M: Work for CP, Teach for VA, chores, art class
T: Babysitting for women's Bible study (a commitment I will not be renewing next semester despite the "easy thirty bucks"), work for CP, prepare youth group lesson, grading etc. Running with Dad
W: Work for CP, lesson-plan, youth group
Th: Teach for VA, work for CP,
F: Lesson-plan, lesson-plan, lesson-plan. Running.

Obviously, there is not a lot of time for Jake in all this, especially when he works all the nights that I'm free. Because it's so frenzied during the week, I tend to place my weekends on a pedestal as my only days to hang out and have fun (with Jake and others). But this weekend, I overdid it.

On Friday, I facilitated the youth group girl's retreat up on Mt. Lemmon with a team of other leaders. We decorated the cabin, cooked up some lasagna, decorated journals, sang worship songs, learned about God.... etc. etc. It was all a really wonderful time and I got to know a girl from our small group a lot better. But I stayed up til 1 in the morning and was up again the next, ready to serve these girls. It was fun! But hardly relaxing. I got home in the late afternoon and spent the rest of the evening trying to solidify my lessons for this week, calling it quits when my eyes watered from staring at my computer screen too intensely.

Sunday morning I went to early service, worked in Sunday school, and jetted over to me and Jake's small group with two newly purchased loaves of epi bread from the local bakery. After small group, I left for another dinner engagement with some friends on the Northwest side of town--which required a frenzied drive on the freeway taking the I-10 east instead of west, turning around, finding the right neighborhood, but walking into the wrong house, before I finally made it to Farzana's house where we enjoyed good company and much laughter together. It was very pleasant time together and I don't regret it. I rushed home so I could  go running with Dad before Jake arrived for a late-night catch-up before the week started again.

So here we are at Monday morning, the day I'm writing this post, and I'd intended on going to a breakfast hosted by the Tucson Missions Network. Having been two times already, the people there capitalized on my youthful energy and asked me if I could come early to help set up and bring some fruit for the breakfast. Despite the early arrival time (6:30 am, which meant leaving my house at 6am, which meant waking up at 5:55), I agreed and had bought the fruit and everything... but 7:40am rolls around and I wake up to my dad in the doorway saying, "So much for getting up at 6." I jumped out of bed, "Holy crap what time is it?" and in my feverish half sleep tried to calculate the math of how long it would take to arrive if I left in 2 minutes exactly. It was not enough. I'd set an alarm, but it didn't go off and now I'd let my friends down.

Perhaps I needed the extra two hours of sleep, but I didn't want it at the expense of disappointing my friends. I wrote an apology note and will see them in person soon. But I think I bit off more than I can chew. Maybe next time, I'll take smaller bites.