through the eyes of katrina

Three weeks into the great New Orleans adventure and I can feel myself starting to settle in. I can get from point A to point B with relative ease (even when point B is something other than my house, school, Walmart, or Target) and the heat, while still oppressive, is no longer an unpleasant surprise every time I step out of an air-conditioned space. But as I've settled in, I've started to realize just how much this city is still defined by Katrina.

In my previous visits to New Orleans, I saw Katrina everywhere I looked--in the houses and neighborhoods I was doing reconstruction work in and in the stories of the people I met. I thought I had at least some understanding of how much the storm affected this city, but after three weeks of living here, I realize I had no idea. Even when it's unspoken, Katrina is a very real part of every day in New Orleans. It's there when I look outside my classroom window and see one of the canals that sent water gushing into New Orleans East, leaving a wake of destruction in a tight-knit neighborhood. It's there in the passing conversations, like the one about bad cell phone service that led my coworker to remark "Yeah, I learned that in the Superdome"--and the realization that if she was in the Superdome, her two kids, who would have been a toddler and an infant, were there with her. It's there in the simple existence of my school, which was opened after too few elementary schools in the East reopened after the storm. It's there every time the cafeteria ceiling leaks, every time I walk into my kitchen (which was renovated after the storm), every time I see a 13-year-old fourth grader and wonder how many years of school they missed in the wake of Katrina. I think that's one of the things that's most daunting to me--not being able to completely understand Katrina and knowing that its aftereffects will be a part of my daily life.

hola, nola!

So I'm a week and a half into PD without much to report. I have all sorts of new toys (newest gadget--a Dell laptop with permanent wireless. This would be a huge win, except for three hours with this computer have reminded me why I swore I would never buy a PC again. Sigh.), my coworkers have finally learned my name (I found out they had all been calling me Ms. Harvard for the last week), and I've experienced the wide range of culinary options in New Orleans East (Subway, Wendy's, salad from Winn-Dixie, and my personal favorite--Pho Bang, a Vietnamese restaurant. Not so much for the food as for the name). But a week and a half in, I couldn't be happier with my school. Even as a first-year, I feel very supported, and I feel like I fit in with the culture of our charter network.

I haven't been able to spend that much time in my classroom this week, which may be a good thing, as our building is completely overrun with all sorts of critters. I killed two cockroaches in my room yesterday, and we've caught no fewer than seven mice (luckily, the mice have been living mostly in the second-grade end of the hallway without wandering down to the third-grade end). What I have quickly learned is the biggest downside to having a building staffed by all women is that everybody is terrified of critters. I am the calmest in these situations, and as my college roommate can tell you, I do not deal well with rodents.

home sweet nola

Well, it's been a crazy week. I'm now back in New Orleans for good, sitting in my house on my new bed and basking in the glory of air conditioning I will soon have to pay the electric bill for. So far, the real world is pretty unglamorous (dinner tonight involved me sitting in bed with a box of pizza watching Sports Night). But institute is over and I'm three days into my new job!

Leaving Atlanta was harder than I thought it would be. I'm really going to miss my kids, and I've already started missing my CMA group. I got spoiled working with such great, funny people who all shared my mindset and my sense of humor, but I'm so grateful for the experience and for the invaluable lessons I took away from it.

One of the hardest parts of leaving my kids was that I left not knowing if I would ever find out if our hard work this summer paid off. The kids all have my email address, but it's on them to let me know if they passed the CRCT, how they're doing in high school, etc. It's a little crazy to have invested five weeks of my life thinking solely about them and their well-being, and then to shift in the span of about 60 hours to focusing solely on the well-being of 80 third-graders I won't meet for another three weeks. Although the last day of school brought plenty of drama (threats of a school-v.-school fight brought the Atlanta police to dismissal), I am really going to miss teaching 8th grade.

the home stretch

This week has been a wacky one--my kids are taking their CRCTs, I'm barely in the classroom, and institute has definitely shifted from worrying about the well-being of my nine students to focusing on how the heck I'm going to take what I've learned in the last five weeks and apply it to my third-grade classroom. But it's also been wacky because of all the other crazy stuff going on around me. I think that how my fellow CMs and I have handled all this is a testament to how much we've grown over institute: I'm now able to take things in stride that would have completely derailed me in my first week of teaching. For example:

1. If you're up on your education news (though I don't blame you if you're not--I just learned about this in the last week), you have probably heard something about the CRCT scandal that has been rocking Atlanta Public Schools over the past two years. Cliff notes version: a report was just released yesterday detailing the extent of the cheating that occurred on the CRCT in 2009 (more than 75% of schools in APS were involved to some degree). One of the schools implicated, though not nearly as severely as others, was the middle school I've been teaching at.

(not) all i do is teach teach teach...

As the fireworks in Atlanta have faded into rumbles of thunder, I'm in bed early in preparation for my last week of institute. This is going to be a weird week because I'm not really teaching anything anymore. Jon and I are running a review class tomorrow, and then my kids start taking their CRCTs on Wednesday (reading Wednesday, math Thursday). There are no more new objectives to teach, no more exit tickets to grade. 7 out of our 9 kids have taken their post-test, and the last two will be completed tomorrow. But more on that later. What I want to talk about right now is the glory that is the three-day weekend.

Institute is a hardcore experience that is incredibly positive in many ways. I've gotten close quickly with a lot of people here, and I'm so thankful that I've been able to build so many friendships in just four or five weeks. It's really hard to believe that just six weeks ago I was living in Adams House preparing for baccalaureate, class day, and graduation. It seems a world away. But what we often lose sight of during institute is that there is, in fact, life outside teaching. And now that my prep is winding down, this three-day weekend was even more enjoyable.