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.

My whole life, I’ve based a lot of my self-worth on the fact that things come naturally to me. I know this isn’t a wise thing, since this will obviously not always be the case. In my 26 years, though, there haven’t been many things that have been very difficult. On the other hand, I know myself pretty well and I can see when something is going to be difficult so maybe I tend to shy away from those things so I don’t have to deal with failure. So maybe it’s not that nothing is difficult for me but that I have always chosen not to challenge myself.

To be honest, I can see this in my school work. School has never been difficult for me, but I’ve never tried to go beyond what I thought I could do. A good example of this would be an English class that my school had called Modern Literature. Everyone knew Modern Lit was the hardest class the English department offered. You had to actually be invited to the class to take it. That’s how exclusive it was. The best and the brightest took that class and they all vented about how much work it required but they also raved about how much they loved it. I decided before I was even offered a place in the class that I was not going to take it. I was not about to add stress to my senior year if it wasn’t necessary. I already had my college acceptance locked in at the university I wanted, so why go through the trouble of taking difficult classes I didn’t need?

Looking back, I can see this pattern of complacence throughout my college career, as well. I’ve always been an A student, but I’ve never pushed myself for the sake of pushing myself. I would do the minimum to get my A, which is all I wanted, and nothing more.

Maybe I didn’t know enough about TFA before I started or maybe I overestimated my ability, but this experience has been hard—definitely one of the hardest I’ve gone through. Being thrown into a classroom of nineteen students who are depending on me to help them get to tenth grade English has been surprising. Lesson planning has not come easy to me. Time management has not come easy to me, either. The only thing that has come easy is being in front of the kids. That has been the one redeeming part of this experience. Going into the last few weeks, though, students’ weaknesses are starting to show and I’m realizing that entertaining them will not cut it. They need real, concrete, transformational help and I have no idea how to give it to them.

I’m realizing more than ever that this experience will require my body, heart, and soul, as I give all my attention to these kids and learn to give them individualized attention and help them succeed in the way that each of them needs. It will require a lot of work and it will be hard, but I know it will be worth it. And I’ll know that if I want to, I really can do hard things.

Yesterday was Father's Day. I didn't write a post because I'm generally unaware of what day it is. And also I don't blog much these days.

But after reading a few other posts about bloggers' fathers, I thought to myself, "My dad is just as cool, if not cooler, than these dads. He deserves his own post."

And THEN I thought, "My dad very recently talked to me for 34 minutes (I checked on my phone), which is a long talk for us, and actually said just the right things to make me feel better."

So I decided to write about my cool and articulate dad.

Here's a great picture of us from about 2 years ago:

I have two people I usually call when I'm upset or need to talk: Jaime and my mom. Last week was an especially rough week and Friday night I was just needing some contact with someone who is not at all affiliated with Teach For America. I called Jaime, but she had plans with some friends so she couldn't talk. My mom was at Girls Camp so she couldn't talk. So I called my dad. We talked for a while about what was going on at home, and then he asked how things were going for me out here in Phoenix. I vented a while and expressed my frustrations with the system and the process and the absurdity of a lot of the stuff going on out here. (Before I continue, don't get any ideas that TFA is a messed up organization. It's awesome. The training process is intense, though, and can be frustrating at times.) He surprised me by not just giving encouraging words, but by actually relating my experience to some of the experiences he had while in law school, and shared some helpful advice. Real, concrete stuff. I was in high school when my dad was in law school, so I've never really heard much about his experiences. Not surprisingly, I wasn't too interested in my dad's law school experience as a teenager. Hearing about it, though, gave me a new window into my dad and who he actually is. More than anything else, it was just comforting to know that I had a dad at home who cared about me, understood at least partially what I was going through, and believed that I have what it takes to make it through and be a transformational teacher when I get back. And if my earthly father feels that way, how much more does my Heavenly Father love, understand, and believe in me?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I felt loved. And that's just what I needed.



20 Days.

Right now, I'm in Tempe, Arizona in what I would label the most difficult experience I've been through. I hesitate to say that since my mission, and the MTC in particular, were extremely difficult. But at the MTC and in a mission there's the overwhelming power of the Spirit to get you through each day. Here, not so much. I do my best to bring the Spirit with me everywhere I go, but many of the people that surround me don't really create an atmosphere which is very conducive to the Spirit. Without that, it makes the experience even more difficult.

But. In 20 days, I will be done. I am so looking forward to the end, not just because it means the end of a time I'm not quite enjoying, but also because it means Road Trip of the Century will commence. (You can click on the picture to make it bigger.)

That's right, I'm driving back to Indiana from Arizona. My best travel buddy Jaime is flying down from Utah to help me, and I couldn't be more excited.

What makes this road trip cooler than all of the others that have occurred in the last hundred years? Our slogan for the trip: Why not?

We're coming within an hour or so of Mississippi and Alabama and neither of us have been, so we might as well just hit MS. Why not?

My family's performing in the Hill Cumorah pageant that week. We're already driving across the country...we could just drive up to New York. Why not?

I've never been to Michigan, so instead of coming back from New York through Pennsylvania and Ohio, we could go through Canada and Michigan. Why not?

The thing I'm most excited about for this trip, aside from spending time with my BFF and seeing seven states I've never been to, is the fact that we have no schedule. We've got 10 days to make this trip, so if we see something along the road that looks interesting, we can stop. If we're tired and want to sleep, we can stop. No one's telling us what to do.

We're trying to do this on a pretty tight budget, so we're looking for couches to crash on along the way. If you know of anyone on our projected path who wouldn't mind lending two very clean and respectful young ladies a couch and a shower for the night, you just let me know. They'll barely even know we're there.

Our estimated driving time as currently calculated by google maps: 58 hours. Why not?

It's been a few weeks since I left Utah and I'll admit, I'm starting to miss it. I really didn't think I would. I felt ready to move on and to do something new and meet new people. I still feel like I made the right choice, but I'm realizing that there are just a lot of great people in Utah and there are also some advantages to living in Utah, such as not hearing the F word twenty times a day, even in professional settings. I don't think there's anything wrong with having a culture that's a little more strict about what is and isn't appropriate.

My last few weeks before leaving Utah, I spent my time visiting lots of people and going to lots of Utah-specific restaurants.

The weekend before I left, I went up to Roy to visit my surrogate family, the Zogmaisters, who have been so good to me the past few years. I'm excited to be able to spend more time with my real family, but I will definitely miss this one.

I got to meet Joey and Michelle's newest little guy, Maijer. He's definitely an Ulm! (Also, doesn't my hair look hot in this picture? Chelle had just cut and styled it. I could never make it look like this on my own. The hair may or may not have been the reason I took this picture.)

Haizyn has always been a funny baby, but she has hit such a great stage. Her little voice is adorable and hilarious at the same time and I love talking to her.

 Saturday morning, Joey ran in the Ogden Half Marathon, so we went to support him. Having just run a half marathon a few weeks before, I felt especially proud of him. I know how much that sucks. My roommate Whitney also ran it, but she was too fast for me - she'd already finished by the time we got there.

Jaiger came out to support his dad and also to show off his guns.

That afternoon Grace, Livvy, and Taigon all graduated from preschool. The program they put on was so cute. They sang, danced, played instruments, and recited nursery rhymes.

 

 Haizyn really, really wanted to be involved.

That night we celebrated Michelle's 29th and final birthday.

The next week, Allie, Whitney, and I had a Bachelorette party. Allie and I got pizza from Slab Pizza (which was delicious!) then we all watched the season premiere of the Bachelorette. I've been watching it since then and it just isn't the same when I'm alone.

Whitney's activity that night was doing an application for the Mormon Bachelor. I don't even know if she ever got picked. I should ask her.

The next night, I met Whitney and Aubrey at JDawg's. That place is magical. It amazes me how they can turn a regular hot dog into a delectable treat. This may or may not have been my second hot dog that night....oops. Do you see why I haven't been doing my diet very well the past several weeks? It's hard to do when you're going to all the best restaurants!

The next night, a big group of us went to Brick Oven. Afterwards, Whitney, Whitney, Hailey, and I went to Kneader's to get lemon raspberry cupcakes. Whitney Ehlers had told us how amazing they were and I'll admit, they were pretty delicious.

Finally, my time in Utah culminated with a trip to the temple with Whitney and Hailey and then a visit to Happy Sumo for the most delicious food that has ever existed. We arrived kinda late, though they were still open, and the hostess told us they weren't seating anyone anymore. I seriously almost cried. This was what I'd been looking forward to for weeks. This was the one place I HAD to hit before I left Utah. She ever so kindly cleared a table for us so we could eat. Looking back, though, I'm realizing she had no right to deny us service when they were still open. I think she just didn't want to work anymore. To think I almost missed out on life-changing sushi, all because some girl wanted to go home early.

 I'm telling you. It's that good.

The very next morning, I set out for Arizona. I drove about twelve hours that day by myself. I was pretty proud of myself. I was able to stop in Monroe, Utah to visit my cousin Melissa and her kids. Then when I got to Arizona, I stayed with my friends Aubrey and Jason Gillespie who had moved from Utah just a few weeks earlier. They're great. The next morning I flew back to Indiana, spent a week there visiting my family and going to a four-day training for Teach For America. Then I came back to Arizona and started my five-week intense training we have here in Tempe. It's been a crazy week and I kind of hate a lot of it. But we're actually teaching starting tomorrow, and I have a feeling that will make it worth it. I love teaching and I know I will get so attached to these kids. I'm excited for this week!

My last ten days have been nothing but Teach For America. I started in Indianapolis last week with Induction (which, after all, did not include hazing. Thank goodness). Saturday night I flew back to Phoenix (though it was actually Sunday morning, since our flight was so delayed that I was going to miss my connecting flight in Denver. I opted to stay in Indy at my sister's house and fly out the next morning instead). Here in Phoenix I am now involved in Teach For America Summer Institute where we will be teaching summer school as a kind of student teaching, all while our skin melts off from the inhumane desert heat.

I was so excited and simultaneously terrified to become part of Teach For America. There are few things I believe in more than every child's right to receive a good education and, as a result, to have options in life. I realized after coming that there was absolutely nothing to be scared of except maybe dying of boredom.

Don't get me wrong. I'm still a believer in this cause and, ultimately, this organization. But I have sat through hours upon hours of "sessions" where we've talked about the movement and spent probably what amounts to hours upon hours "reflecting" about our feelings on a myriad of subjects. Oh.my.gosh. We're just barely starting to get into lesson planning and stuff and we'll finally meet our students on Friday. That will be two solid weeks of talking about doing something when really all I want to do is actually do something.

I've been feeling really bogged down by all the incessant chatter the last couple days and this afternoon we got on a bus and headed to the Mesa Performing Arts Center for Welcoming Ceremonies, aka more talking.

I was very pleasantly surprised, though. One of the speakers this afternoon was a thirteen-year-old boy who is currently being taught by a Teach For America teacher. This kid was amazing. I was crying while he was speaking. Not joking. It was pretty embarrassing, actually. He's two years ahead in math and plans to graduate from Harvard, then go on to Yale Law School and pass the New York bar exam. I have no doubt that he will. All because one teacher saw him not as the minority that he is, but as the incredibly smart and driven young man that he is. I was so grateful for this reminder of why I'm in this. I'm not here because it's fun. I'm here because I can change the lives of these kids by partnering with their families and communities to set them on the trajectory towards absolute success. In the hours of "inspiring" sessions I've been in the past several days, turns out it's the kids that do it best.

It's probably not surprising, either, that he was a bit chubby. It's like they hand-picked him just for me.