Symbolism of a Heart in Action

Every second Sunday my church holds a special service so that things are kept interesting and the congregation can participate more fully. Often the sermon is presented by a member of the body with music, images, and stories from their life's lessons. Last Sunday my church held an "Instructed Eucharist." Obviously this is one in which the congregation is instructed on something. In this case it was the Eucharist itself and what all different parts of it mean and how they work together. It was an exquisite service, full of symbolism and love for the meaning behind and in the things we use during it and what our actions represent. Even better it enabled the congregation to participate more closely in the Eucharist as we were gathered around the Lord's table during the meal's preparation.

The writer of this excellent teaching was our new Assistant Rector, Matt Wise. Last summer, he was our "summer seminarian" and the young man who gave me guitar lessons. He recently graduated from seminary and is now doing his internship as a deacon until he is officially ordained as a priest on December 13th. Matt has a real love of liturgy and is responsible for many of the changes that are occurring in ours. I think his heart thinks in visuals of what something means and how it can play out.

I walked in late, just after the service started, and sat down in my early service front pew. Matt was sitting right in front of me on a tall stool with his notes on a podium. That was kind of cool. I've always liked sitting at the front of the class near the teacher. I hadn't missed much because the words that caught my attention were at almost the very beginning of the running commentary that continued throughout the entire service. They were:

In some ways, our liturgy is a drama enacted each time we gather with the hopes of drawing us all closer to one another as we together encounter the presence of the risen Christ among us. To help us experience this co-union or communion, we use many symbols. Symbols are signs that participate in the reality that they represent. A symbol works on us at a visceral level and the symbols we use in the Eucharist follow a pattern and form a ritual. Rituals help us experience and express things that cannot be easily verbalized.

After that my attention was pretty much locked to the explanations, my curiosity peaked. Fascinated I followed through the entire service every word that was spoken by either Matt or our Rector, Robert. I'd like to share this sermon with you so I invite you to go here and read the entire service teaching. It has a lot of good things in it.

In Support of Right Brain - Left Brain

JS's post of the Right Brain - Left Brain test really got me thinking. I went to the website and played with the spinning image and the text. What I found out was that if I looked at the text on the side of the page and let my brain become aware of the spinning image out of the corner of my eye I could occasionally see a change in the direction of spin. This intrigued me enough to try it several times. I wasn't always successful. It seems that the more I tried to look at the image the more right brained I became. But if I worked at reading the text I became left brained. That will probably be food for thought later. Surely this has something to do with how children learn to read and maybe there are ways to use the right brain - left brain thing to help them be more successful at it.

This morning on "Meditations for Women" the weekly article was about, you guessed it, being right brained or left brained. The article told of a story the author had read about how a woman who worked out of her home had found her daughter's art supplies in the kitchen before she went to her office and started to work. She sat down and started playing with the glitter, markers and other supplies for about 30 minutes. Then she got up and went into her office and started to work. At the end of the day she was amazed at how much she had gotten done. The creative activity at the beginning of the morning had helped her kick into full right brain mode. She decided to do it every morning and she attributed her success to the practice of 30 minutes of creative activity. The author of the article said she tried the same thing with similar results. She also commented that a friend of hers who is very creative and needs to be more analytical will do something structured...she counts tiles in the ceilings when she needs to turn on the logic juices.

So...maybe that is something I can use in my work. Maybe you can too. I wonder if writers, like my friend Susan, do this kind of thing when they get writers block? There may be entire studies out there on how to use strategies to activate the necessary side of your brain when you need it. If so I haven't read them, but I can see the potential. Yet another sign of being right brained. (G)

Peace! Hope! & Joy!

Home sick - Moderately productive

Sometime during the past week I caught a cold. It manifested itself this weekend in the form of a fairly vicious headache and a very painful sore throat. This is a one sided sore throat and hurt so much that at 3:30 AM Sunday morning I was online researching symptoms of strep throat. I decided that I don't have it based on 2 things. I don't have a high fever. I do have sinus drainage. So I'm probably dealing with a regular viral cold and just feel awful. I called in sick for today and will probably be home in bed tomorrow too. I feel that bad. That's rare for me this year. Mostly my health has been good thanks to vitamins and frequent hand washing. Since I work at a public school those two measures seem to be vital to maintain good health. One of the desires of every public school teacher is that parents would not use the school as a baby sitting service when their children are sick. If you child is sick they need to be home in bed, not at school feeling crummy and making their teachers' lives miserable. That doesn't cover the fact that children who go to school sick spread their germs around and then everyone gets sick.

So, here I am at home, reading email, trying to get rest, and feeling I need to use the time productively. To accomplish the productivity I went searching for my student teaching packet, a task which got a lot of trash papers thrown away, and proceeded to take care of two necessary pieces of business. I emailed the student teaching department and confirmed my intent to student teach. I then went online and registered for that course for this fall. Yes folks, it's official! I will student teach in fall of 2007.

That's one of the things that has been worrying me of late. I am quite the perfectionist, so of course I want to do well. I also want to do my student teaching in a place that will put me in a good position to get a job when I'm done. I think I have that managed. I'm on my districts list as a student teacher and have written the student teaching coordinator (at her request) with my preferences for campus choices. Hopefully I'll get one of them.

This also puts pressure on me to update my resume, get letters of recommendation from teachers I've worked with, and make sure my financial ducks are in order for the fall. Thankfully I've done my taxes so I can reapply for student loans. They should meet the needs I have for that semester. I'm going to have to quit my job at the middle school. That makes me nervous. You do better looking for a job if you have one already. But you can't student teach and hold down a 40 hour a week job.

At some point I should probably go over my wardrobe and weed out the stuff I no longer wear, get some new shoes for work, and make sure I have enough professional outfits that I can wear to teach in. Fortunately, my beloved sister bought me a nice professional looking suit for Christmas. I already have enough short sleeved sweaters to wear with it and think I only need some nice discrete jewelry to add to the quality of the look.

With that being said, I'm now pretty much exhausted and am planning on heading back to bed for some more rest. Please keep me in your prayers for returning health and also for the upcoming semesters.

Peace!

Bright and shining vision

The work week has started. The kids are back in school. And yesterday I had a nice heartwarming moment. It was a view of one of the things I dream about when I see my future.

It was 6th period and I was in science class. The teacher and I had tried to get the kids to quiet down enough to do an activity that would be part discussion and part experiment. That hadn't worked so I wrote vocabulary words on the board, we handed out dictionaries to the groups and their assignment was to look up the definition of each word.

Some of them didn't have good dictionary skills so that was part of the learning experience. I went around assisting about 5 different tables of kids. If they knew how to use the dictionary they were pretty much self learners and worked really well on their own. The others I would help look up words and keep on task.

At one point the teacher had to step out to take care of something and left me in charge. This is a notoriously rowdy class but he'd done this before so it wasn't horrible. The nice thing about this time was that the kids were so busy that most of them didn't even notice he'd left. I kept circling among the groups that were being productive and those needing support. I was so busy and into that teaching/support flow that I didn't notice his absence either.

That was when it happened. In one split second of awareness I realized that things were working well. The kids were learning and staying involved in what they were supposed to be doing, I was keeping up with their needs, my scan of the classroom was doing what it should (show me where I was needed), and the classroom was functioning as it was supposed to.

That vision made me happy in a way that nothing else could have. That vision is what I dream of when I envision my future classroom. It must be one of the joy of every teacher when they see things going smoothly and learning flows. I am so thankful for that moment that I had to share it. Thank God for that bright and shining vision.

Carnival of Hope and a sigh of relief!

Carnival of Hope is up at Susan's place and I'm happy to be included. Thanks, Susan!

It's been a chaotic week full of ups and downs. The bright spots include my birthday, doing morning prayer, and some lovely responses from friends to requests I've made. The frustrating ones are the poor choices in behavior some of the students I see daily have made. It feels really bad when no less than 5 kids get sent to the Principal's office and one of them ends up in ISS. I don't like feeling like an ogre.

So this weekend I'm going to stay relaxed, eat lots of chocolate, watch a movie (Mission Impossible 3) and try to get some school work done. I have about 4 chapters, 3 articles, two tests to examine and a good book to start. And somewhere in the middle of all that I have to do my taxes and finish the applications for student teaching. Wish me peace and productivity guys, I surely need it.

School's back in session!

The past 3 days have been a lively return to work.. Classrooms are somewhat thinned as some students didn't show back up yet. Some kids are doing the "crazy back in school" thing and driving the teachers batty. So are some of the coworkers.

My schedule should have been normal and pretty similar to what it was before winter break. Instead for the past 2 days one of my coworkers has been absent so my schedule got rapidly rearranged. Remember my job is taking students to different classes and then sticking around to give them support (keeping them on task, pointing them in the right direction, functioning as a walking, talking dictionary and sometimes textbook). Usually I have 1 or 2 students to help. Small brag here...some students seem to prefer my help and have started asking to sit by me or just move to where I am when the need arises. The past couple of days I have been walking back and forth across classrooms keeping 3 students on task. I should have been wearing my step meter because I think I walked about 2 miles doing the classroom management thing. Happily for me the students who would have moved to sit near me just walked up and asked for help while I was moving between the others. You know what? I actually liked being that busy. I felt productive and on top of things. My adrenalin was up and the students were doing just fine. If that is what teaching is going to be like I am going to find times that I am very happy doing the normal thing of helping students do what they should. Yep! Busy is good!

On the college front, I'm in the process of getting permissions for a required course. Because the program I'm in is a post-baccalaureate undergraduate program all my courses are normally undergraduate too. However, the one course I really need prior to student teaching only has one section at night and fills up so quickly that I've missed registering in it for the past two semesters. So I am trying to get all the signatures needed to allow me to take it at the graduate level. There are 3 people who have to sign this paperwork and so far I am 1 down and 2 to go. Normal registration closes on Sunday and late registration starts next Wednesday. So things are getting kind of tight. If worse comes to worse, I may have to take a couple of hours off to go get the signatures needed...especially since getting the dean's requires me to hand deliver the form. Sigh! Pray for me please!

Small Pleasures

This is going to sound awfully silly but, I have just discovered the joys of color transparencies. Tomorrow I am giving a lesson on climate to a group of 4th graders. During the lesson we will be discussing weather, natural resources such as rivers and other water sources, elevation, landforms and industry. When looking for the definition of climate it surprised me to find that it was weather over a period of 30 years. So I went looking for a weather database. I found one and was delighted with all the different types of information I could gather from it. Then, because we are looking at the different regions of Texas I went looking for a map which showed them. I found wonderfully colorful maps of Texas showing all kinds of stuff. So I printed a couple to see how they looked on paper...and promptly decided they would look cool on an overhead projector. So I made copies of no less than 4 different maps all of them in color and a copy of one data chart so that I could show the kids how to pull the information we needed from it. Now I am ready to go and in glowing greens, blues, yellows and browns. I even have some pinks and grays thrown in somewhere. (g)

So what are the maps I'm taking into the classroom going to show?
1) the Texas River Basins and streams, bayous, and coastline,
2) the 7 different travel regions of Texas - these are similar to the geographic regions
3) the natural regions as well as the river basins and such.
4) the precipitation in Texas.

When I get this all put up there for the kids we will discuss them and have tons of fun as I turn two of them into imaginary rain gauges so that we can measure the rain in Texas. We will research our regions by looking up the data for one city in each region. We will then compare the weather of these areas and discuss what it might be like to live and work there. Hopefully all of this color and make believe will hold their attention long enough for the ideas to sink in. And I get graded on this so I want to do my best.

Another small pleasure today was the purchase of a microcassette recorder. I need to record a student reading to me so that was the excuse for this purchase. I figured that later I could use it for recording class lectures at college. In reality I just liked the idea of going small instead of borrowing one of those shoebox sized ones from the library. So now I get to go armed with technology and some really cool looking maps. Who said there was no fun in teaching?

From Grace to Chaos

Yesterday I officiated at the performance of Morning Prayer. That is a pleasant time for me because it is solitary and gives me much needed, and often neglected, time with God. As it turns out I really needed that time. Some of it was spent in prayers for others but some was spent asking for healing for me. I'm still hurting over the loss of my friend.

When I was through with Morning Prayer I thought the day would go well. Instead it was almost total chaos. The teacher in charge had a meeting to attend so she left 3 aids in charge of the classroom. During that hour and a half we had: 2 students who hurt each other's feelings and thus weren't cooperating with each other in loud angry voices, one student who just totally refused to cooperate with the aid's requests and left the room twice without permission to go wandering the halls thus requiring an aid (me) to leave the others in charge and go following him around to be sure he didn't run off the campus, yet another student was so late from a quick trip to the restroom that she was given a "tardy" thus destroying her perfect record (they get rewards for this) and later that day she made a rude hand sign to another student and was put on report by the teachers who caught her in the act, and to top it all off I got to watch eight 8th graders retake a history test which they had all done poorly on and the administrator of this test gave them the answers as he was reading the questions to them. Now where is the education in that? Heck, where is the plan?

Saving grace? When the teacher got back and heard what had happened she went on discipline mode and had a long talk with the kids. The end result is that they are assigned the homework of writing letters of apology to each aid. I was pleased to hear the lecture. The apology letter makes me squirm almost as much as Susan's evening made her uncomfortable.

I'm not sure why this assignment embarrasses me. The students are certainly going to think about what they have done when they write it. It is a good learning activity. The aids are definitely entitled to the apologies. Maybe this is my old "could I have done things differently and better" alert system raising its head. When I watched the student who roamed the halls walk into our Spec. Ed. Clerk's office and talk to her and a teacher I watched compassion in practice. They recognized he was having a bad day. They tried to joke him out of it. I guess I was too far along to have seen it till it was shown to me. That makes me feel so guilty because all of my career as a teacher I am going to run into kids who are having bad days. One of my jobs is going to be to teach them how to handle that kind of thing. I don't think I did very well yesterday.

The day closed better than I hoped for after that. A teacher friend gave me the needed transparency film thus saving me a trip to the store. I have written a letter of sympathy to the teacher who was in the meeting because during her lecture to the students she mentioned having a friend who was probably going to lose a family member to illness. This was the same teacher who went out of her way to write me a sympathy card earlier. I want to show her the same care and consideration she showed me. And so I grow even as I struggle. Are we back to Grace? Not quite, but we are getting there. Now if only I could think of a way to teach my students what I learned from yesterday, which is that even when you are struggling with not having done well in areas that matter you can still find some places to redeem yourself.