I'm spending five weeks here at Institute in Phoenix and I never take pictures. How am I going to remember it? To be honest, I'm not sure I'll want to remember it. But I went ahead and documented a day in my life. This isn't really a typical day, because it was a Friday, but it was pretty close.

A day in my life as a Teach For America corps member at Institute.

Friday, June 22, 2012.



Yesterday I got up at 4:15, though I usually get up at 4:30 or 4:45, depending on if I need to shower. I get ready with this small little lamp as my light because ASU apparently believes in conserving energy so they don't put overhead lights in the dorms. I'm not kidding. Weirdest thing ever. Then I walk down this dark hallway to go to breakfast. The lights are motion-activated and there aren't many people going to breakfast at 5:15 am. 

My typical breakfast: Special K with bananas and a bowl of fruit. Sometimes if I'm feeling rebellious, I have a small cheese danish because they're sooooo good. Yesterday I resisted, though.

This is Rebecca. You'll see a lot of her because she's in my small group at school (we teach the same kids and work on everything together) and she's funny so I like to be around her. We spend lots of time together.

After breakfast, we go through the lunch line. We have to take our lunch so before we leave, we collect a sandwich (I usually get the turkey sandwich if they have one), a drink (water for me), and three snacks or side items. And an ice pack. Then we get on the busses and ride for about 35 minutes before we get to Westview High School in Avondale, Arizona. There are 650 corps members here at this institute and not everyone goes to the same school, and they don't leave at the same time. We're on the first busses because our kids come at 7:30 am.

We get to school and head straight to our CMA rooms. CMA groups are groups of about twelve corps members who have one Corps Member Advisor. Ours is Devon Lasiter. We meet with her in the morning for a little bit before we get started.

Devon has a dog named Lilikoi who she brings to school with her. I hate dogs, but I actually love Lili. I still don't let her touch me, but I like to talk to her and I like to have her around. She's just so darn happy and she goes ballistic when we all get there, running and jumping around like a crazy dog because she's so happy to see us.

We teach our classes in groups of four - each of us gets about an hour to teach and we rotate every week. Our group teaches English to kids going into tenth grade. This week I taught first so I got to be there when the kids were coming in and I really enjoyed the few minutes to chat with them as they were getting settled in. I love these kids. They're really well-behaved and they're just fun. Yesterday I played Justin Bieber's "Boyfriend" for them as they came in because I'm obsessed with it. I'm pretty sure they thought I was a freak.

After I finish teaching, I go back to the CMA room where I have time to work. Half of our group is in a large group session when I get back and almost everyone else is teaching so Lili and I have some time alone together. I often work on lesson plans but, as you can see, I also spend some quality time on facebook. Working on my computer all day means I check facebook like fifteen times a day. Sometimes I just need a break, ok? Unfortunately, very few people update their facebook as often as I check it so I don't have much to read. Lame.

This is the bathroom. I spend lots of time here, as you can imagine. There are no mirrors in this school, though. Weird, huh? It's very frustrating sometimes.

After work time, I head to a session. Sometimes it's about classroom behavior management, sometimes it's about lesson planning, sometimes it's about literacy. Today it was about Diversity...something. DCA. I already forget what it stands for. The sessions are generally hated by all corps members because they're long and boring and they take away from the time that we could be actually accomplishing something. This is my friend Anna.

12:30. Lunch time. Glorious time. Unfortunately, since we eat breakfast at 5:15, I'm usually hungry before lunch time, so I eat parts of my lunch throughout the morning. That makes lunch pretty disappointing sometimes. I usually bring a few extra snacks, though.

As I mentioned before, Fridays are a bit different in the afternoon. Usually we have more sessions, which are a death trap after lunch. It's so hard to stay awake. Fridays, though, we have Advisory Session with our CMA group, which often turns into more work time or socializing time. I'm sure it's supposed to be more structured than that but our group is cool and we do what we want.

Here's the group. Front from the left: Claire, Rebecca, Anna, Bryan. Back from the left: Kendall, Devon, Amanda, me, Alexis and Lili, Kelsie, Craig, Vickie, and Barry.

Today for Advisory we did an activity called Breaking Boundaries. It was a team-building activity that Amanda had that makes you answer a lot of questions so you find out a lot about your team members. We sat on our desks in a circle. It was impossible for me to not swing my feet. Others had a similar problem I think.

Last thing on Fridays is a school team meeting. We usually do some kind of competition among the groups and share shout-outs for people who we think did great things that week. This week our competition was about Teach For America acronyms (There are a million. For real.). Somehow I got nominated to represent my team. I lost in the second round.

This is when I was so sure I got the answer right. But I didn't. Ironically, the question was about DCA, which as I said before, I still don't know the meaning of. I thought it was Diversity and Cultural Awareness which I think is a pretty good description of what those sessions are about, so I think I should've been right.

Then we have some time to just hang out and dance around until the busses come.

I usually listen to music and fall asleep on the bus ride home. Or sometimes I'm entertained by Rebecca.

Back at the dorms, we have to go through this cage (two locked doors), another locked door to the stairwell, a locked door onto our floor, then our locked room doors. It's more secure than a prison, I think.

Usually, there's a group of four of us that come back right after school (at 4:30) and eat dinner together because we're already starving. Fridays we get back an hour earlier, though, so the dinner group is a little different.

On a typical day, I would spend the rest of the night working on lesson plans, going to the gym to go running, then going to the copy center and printing and copying everything I need for the next day's lesson. I'm usually in bed before 10:00. Last night, though, I came back to my room and talked to Jaime for a while, then fell asleep at 7:30, woke up to get ready for bed, and went back to bed. So I pretty much went to bed at 7:30. And I did no work. That's definitely not a typical day.