Back in Chicago - Free School Forever

A few weeks into summer and a thousand miles away from Albany, I am still thinking about the Free School all the time.  I hesitate to try to summarize what the experience of teaching there meant to me - as it is I even have trouble giving a succinct answer when people ask what the Free School is.

Yet I do want to write about some of the ways that my teaching practices changed over the course of my year there.  In short I am a completely different teacher than I was.  Let me try to break it down:

1. I am so much more relaxed and trusting of the kids. 
When I taught in schools here in Chicago, I was often on high alert - ready to intervene when an argument threatened to escalate into a fight, ready to intervene when a bored or frustrated kid did something to create a little chaos, ready to intervene when a kid's misunderstanding suggested that they wouldn't master the assigned objective in the class time allotted.  It was always my job to manage everything because the kids were not empowered to manage themselves or hold each other accountable.

But Free School kids know how to resolve their own conflicts most of the time, and when they don't the whole community is there to support a solution.  Free School kids are in charge of keeping themselves interested - if a class doesn't excite them, they don't attend, and if they are in the room, chances are they are engaged.  Over time I found it was not my job to solve every problem - I could relax and let the kids figure things out.  And if I needed more calm or more attentiveness than I was getting, usually all I had to do was ask.  I didn't have to battle and I rarely had to cajole. It was extremely liberating and it changed my whole demeanor with kids - I became freer and more fun.

2. I am more patient.
Most importantly, I discovered that in a Free School, class time exists to serve the needs of the students.  We were not beholden to standards.  We did not need to rush to get ready for a high-stakes test.  If it took two weeks to learn something then we could take two weeks.  Over time I found that without the time pressures that exist in a typical school, I could be a lot more patient in my teaching.  I found myself allowing the kids' more time to make mistakes and think about them and to explore their own methods of doing things.  I found myself giving fewer instructions and asking more questions.  In short, I started to teach math the way I had always believed was best but for various reasons had never fully embraced. I lost my fear of blank stares.  I improvised more. Which brings me to point three:

3. I experiment more.
In a typical classroom, students have little space to move and, because of the size of the class, few opportunities to talk.  They are given little autonomy and, as a result, often lack maturity even in situations where autonomy is given to them.  Any lesson a teacher plans has to keep these constraints in mind. 

I always wanted to teach lessons that involved exciting materials and encouraged students to move around, but in practice this required very careful preparation to make sure everyone could get what they needed without elbowing one another in the face.  At the Free School I could throw a pile of manipulatives on a table and say, go nuts.  If a student wanted to use glitter and highlighters to present their work, they knew where to find them.  If a student wanted to work in a quieter room, it was no problem to let them go unsupervised.

And if I tried a new activity or game or problem and it fell flat or students were confused, it was easy for them to express their confusion in productive ways - to comment aloud and to question me and each other.  It was easy for me to re-explain or make changes on the fly.

I know there are teachers in typical schools who do all these great things, and to some extent I always tried to be one of them.  But being at the Free School just made it so much easier.  There were no longer any obstacles to trying something new.
 
4. My values are more connected to my teaching.
I came to teaching with a desire to empower underprivileged kids by educating them and helping them to educate themselves.  Over time I grew to believe that my work should be explicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-queer-phobic, and that I should help kids develop a political consciousness.  But how could I best bring those values into the classroom when there seemed to barely be time for human connection, let alone deep engagement with politically charged topics?  Especially when I began to believe that certain aspects of my school as an institution were actually reproducing harmful patterns of oppression? 

For example, I began to believe that our school's discipline system was punitive in ways that reproduced the worst aspect of our criminal justice/prison system and set kids up to be punished by that system later.  But it was hard for me even to acknowledge that belief to myself.  Here was a school that I invested a lot of effort to grow.  And I needed the discipline system to work so I could teach.  Yet I wondered what I should do about the fact that a school I was working so hard to build was in some ways making things worse for kids.  I went back and forth between denial, anger, trying to have conversations with the people I worked with and push for change, and wishing the status quo would just work so I could stop having to think about it so hard.

Needless to say that was exhausting.  In the Free School, I found a place where staff and students have honest and explicit conversations about values and about anti-oppression on a near-daily basis.  Which is not to say that I feel like I have become an expert at teaching for anti-oppression.  But I am no longer content to keep quiet about those beliefs in any school where I work.  I have come to see that engagement with such topics is both necessary and possible.

4. I am more myself.
I let the kids see my unshaven legs. 

5. I am happier and less tired. And I want to go to work.
The school year ended and for the first time this year I didn't feel relieved. I felt sad to go and I felt like I could just keep teaching forever.  Now a few weeks later I am back in the classroom helping teach a summer program for students from Woodlawn, and it feels great.  I have become so much more optimistic about what kids are capable of when we let them have the autonomy they need to do things for themselves.  And even in contexts that are not the Free School, I am able to trust kids.  And it feels great.

6. And more?
I know there are other ways my teaching has changed, but I can't necessarily see them from inside my own body.  If any of you out there reading this can think of anything you would like to ask me about this experience, please do ask.  

Boys and girls

Sixth, seventh, and eighth grade boys make pizza dough for Friday lunch.

The Free School can seem like a haven of gender nonconformity.  Every day I am struck by small moments that would be met with teasing or ostracism elsewhere.  Sometimes I see it in what kids do - boys cook, girls learn to build wilderness shelters and climb trees.  Sometimes I see it in how kids look - fashion choices can be individual and everyone accepts that - anyone can wear long hair or pink.  We never walk in two lines down the hall, boys on one side and girls on the other, as we did at my old school.

More importantly, our community allows and supports emotional expressions that kids elsewhere are conditioned to shut off as they grow older.  Two boys can sit side-by-side on the couch.  Hugging nad crying are accepted.  An older boy lends his gym shoes to a younger one.  These are ordinary human things that happen and every time I am surprised, it reminds me of how tough and how cruel the schools where I used to work could be.  In a place where affection is more unconditional, the kids here have a lot less to prove.

But I still see gender roles playing out.  I still see mostly girls with dolls and mostly boys wearing red and blue. I see council meetings where the boys all sit on one side of the room and the girls on the other.  Expectations about gender expression are some of the most ubiquitous foundations of identity in our society - kids get ideas about how to be a boy and how to be a girl everywhere.  And the world tells them that only by being a boy or a girl successfully can they be a person successfully.  And it is easy to imagine that we are having some sort of utopian moment here at school, but in fact the world pokes its head in all the time. 

Less Money, More Problems

A number of people have asked me about how the Free School's finances work.  The short answer is that they are always squeezed, but lately some developments have stretched money even further. 

The Free School gets about 60% of its budget from tuition, which is charged on a sliding scale. (The radical curriculum here, free of standards, standardized tests, grades, and all the traditional baggage, would not be possible if this were a public school.) We don't turn students away based on ability to pay, and in fact because over half of our students are eligible for free or reduced lunch, we have a very high percentage of families who pay little or no tuition. 

The remaining 40% comes from a group called Friends of the Free School, a non-profit that owns several apartment buildings in the area and manages them on behalf of the school, using some collected rent to help fun school operations.  We also fundraise like crazy, but most of that money goes for special things like building improvements or class trips.

Because even the maximum tuition is relatively low for a private school (about $10,000), hardly anybody pays the maximum, and class sizes here are very small, even the rosiest budgetary situation involves pinching every penny.  If anything should go wrong, the financial situation can devolve into a crisis pretty quickly.

The biggest single item in our budget is teacher salaries.  You would cry if you knew how little our teachers make, and I'm not going to tell you for the sake of privacy, but suffice it to say it's not really a living wage.  But there isn't much else we spend money on - we don't do texbooks, and we get many supplies donated, so if tuition gets paid late or there are unexpected bills, it jeopardizes the school's ability to pay teachers on time. 

Recently a government agency that subsidizes childcare, and therefore funds tuition for some of our families, especially families of younger kids who use after-school care, withdrew its funding.  Apparently a form was filled out incorrectly a very long time ago by someone who used to work here.  This will get rectified, but in the meantime we are short about a quarter of our tuition. 

In meetings people offer to make huge sacrifices - working for less pay.  These are teachers who already have second jobs to pay their bills.  When someone is out we don't hire a sub, we just reshuffle our schedules.  And still it feels like maybe it's not going to be enough. 

The teachers who make democratic education happen for these kiddos every day are committed.  Any school like ours, which does something radical and different, always has to fight to survive, and everyone accepts that.  But I also know that teachers don't stay here as long as they might, because of the low pay and uncertainty.  And I think this place, which can be such an oasis of joy in a grim educational landscape, deserves to continue. 

Opting In and Opting Out - Part 1 - What Makes Kids Interested?

This morning we watched a movie during junior high math class.  We are studying geometry.  The students have also taken a resurgent interest in origami lately since Mike Barry, who usually teaches the little kids and is an origami enthusiast, has been subbing for Bhawin.  The movie we watched is called Between the Folds, and it explores different origami styles and methods by examining the work of some of the foremost paper folders.  It also touches on the connections between origami and math, science, engineering, and other forms of art.  It is one of those slow but mind-expanding documentaries.

J was bored throughout.  He was unfocused, restless.  He got up several times, leaving the room and coming back, sitting on the floor, playing with his phone. He asked to leave. J doesn't need my permission to leave, no consequence will befall him if he leaves - and yet, I didn't want to endorse him leaving.  I was somehow not comfortable giving him permission. Maybe he sensed my agenda and that turned him off further, I don't know.

Later it was time for our virtual trip to South Africa.  Virtual trips happen once a month - we all get together, pretend to fly to a country (we watch youtube clips of airplanes touching down at each particular airport), watch videos and presentations, and then eat the food of that country for lunch.  I always enjoy it, especially the lunch.  But again, J complained.  He didn't want to go. 

J is certainly not the only student who resists certain activities. He is a relatively mild-mannered kid - if he doesn't want to do something, he protests a bit but it is hardly a big deal. But still I noticed that in these situations it was hard to get him interested.  

Since coming to the Free School I have been thinking a lot about opting out - that is, what happens when kids chose not to do things.  Especially things that other schools would make them do, with the belief that those learning experiences are necessary.  I have a lot of questions, like, what happens if a kid always opts out of learning something that is important for them to know?  Are we doing our job in educating them?  Why do kids opt in or out of a particular activity?  How can we create conditions that encourage kids to opt in to learning and get the most out of school, without coercing them?

First and foremost, kids opt out of things that are not interesting to them - "this is boring!" is a common refrain.  But in interacting with J today, I realized that it is often not necessarily the activity itself that determines whether a kid is interested.  That is, we can't just think about creating "interesting" activities.  We have to ask, how to we foster kids to be "interested" in general.

The quality of being interested varies a lot by kid, not just with respect to which activities they like and dislike, but in general.  Some students at our school find a million things to engage in.  Some find only a few, but engage very passionately.  But some kids seem a bit adrift - they are frequently bored and it is hard to get them interested in anything. And I wonder, is this okay? Should we just let it unfold? Should we let the students come to their learning completely on their own terms? Or should we try to create conditions that foster engagement?

So where does interested-ness come from?  In adolescents I notice that in some cases kids who have had difficult experiences outside of school have trouble engaging in school. It might be connected to the hierarchy of needs - it's hard to focus when basic physical or emotional needs are unmet.  It might also be connected to experiences of stress and trauma, since those can lead to "hypervigilance" and an inability to focus on anything in particular.

Still, some kids who are not immediately interested can be provoked if you engage with them one-on-one, talking to them about the topic at hand.  Others become interested if they see peers engaged.  Others respond to hands-on presentations or humor.  As teachers, we think a lot about how to make the material engaging.  But I also want to think in the longer term, about how to support kids so that they will engage spontaneously, without so much song and dance from their teachers.  I want them to be able take on their own learning projects on topics that they care about.

At the Free School, one way we foster interested-ness is simply by letting kids run with their passions without too many interruptions.  Kids get to experience what it feels like to be deeply engaged for a long period of time, and they discover that a particular topic often has surprises lurking beneath the surface.  However, we haven't succeeded in getting all of our kids to really feel this thrill or seek it out.

I would welcome comments from others about what you have notice about kids who seem interested versus those that don't.

January

Students learn about mental disabilities during community class.

Student learn experience visual impairment during community class.

Students attempt to read lips to simulate the experience of hearing impairment.

It has hovered between zero and twenty degrees all week.  The playground is deserted and field trips are few.  So, how do Free School students pass the time in the depths of winter?

If you are four, your main obsession currently is play-dough.  We made a basket of dough fruits and Lilibeth, who is our substitute teacher while Bhawin is away, led us in reciting the names of the fruits in English and Spanish.  The four-year-olds are also enjoying many dance parties (limbo, freeze dance, cha cha slide) and demanding a lot of piggy-back rides.

If you are five, you spend a good deal of time with Legos, letters, dragon stories, and ooblek. Mariana enojoyed sitting in my lap dancing to Whiteney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody," and everyone loves playing number bingo and counting model animals.

If you are nine, you spend some of your time arguing about math word problems.  Which cell-phone plan should the hypothetical Tim get?  The pay-as-you-go plan is a better deal but the unlimited plan is better because, well, it's unlimited. There are also English workbooks, snowball fights, scrabble, and learning to crochet.  Oh, and a whole day when everyone drew on a fake mustache.

If you are 13, a good hobby is downloading an iPhone app the inserts ghost images into pictures and using it to scare the crap out of little kids.  There are also handstand competitions, Adele songs on the piano, lending your gym shoes to younger boys who forgot theirs, and folding origami dragons.  Not to mention having a contest to see who can draw the best right angle and trash-talking during an angles relay race.

Everyone loves trips to the gym, pancakes for lunch, and making a giant mess.  Everyone loves to argue and get on other people's nerves - three council meetings in the last week and another in the offing for sure.  No one reads all that much on their own, to my eternal frustration, though they all seem to enjoy reading stories as a class.  A number of kids are thinking about applying to other private schools next year, and aside from the obvious issue that those other schools are very expensive, I wonder if they know what life is like in January at other schools.  

Here are some things we are not doing: test prep drills.  Detention.  Uniform checks.  Walking in lines.  Sitting quietly.

Hug Your Children

I was mentally referring to myself as childless the other day and then I realized that is wrong.  I have hundreds of children.

Today twenty children who were very precious to their mothers, fathers, grandmothers,
teachers. . . were shot and killed in a school shooting along with seven of their teachers.

When something terribly tragic like this happens (and it happens so often now) the instinct of any parent is to want to hug their children.

I found out about this tragedy today while I was at school, via whispers from another teacher.  I had no intention of telling the kids - better they hear about it from their own parents if they are old enough for it to be appropriate.  Not a minute later I had two happy four-year-olds on my lap, so it was a cinch to give hugs all around. I am not childless - my life is overflowing with children.

The four-year-olds and I were spectators at a glow-in-the-dark fashion show, wearing highlighter bracelets that shone under the black light and cheering as twenty girls pranced down the "runway" made of tables in their hand-sewn outfits. And everyone was so very vibrantly alive.

Earlier today I accompanied a group of students to visit an archeological dig at an Underground Railroad site, an old Albany house that is being restored into a museum.  We pawed through mud and looked at old pottery shards, a tobacco pipe, and a gunflint.  The kids climbed piled of dirt and peered down into holes.  And everyone was so vibrantly alive.

That house hosted formerly enslaved fugitives who were on their way to Canada in the 1840's and 1850's.  Corey, the head archeologist, who is also the husband of a teacher at my school, told us about the African-American people who owned and lived in that house, and their neighbors.  He told us about all the work they did providing food, shelter, and clothing.  We saw a bulletin from the meetings of their Fugitive Aid Society.  Corey encouraged us to think of them not as stiff formal people from a stuffy era, but as social activists.  He encouraged us to think of the enslaved people escaping as activists, too - people who worked to author their own destiny.

Gun violence kills children every day in this country.  In Chicago alone 24 children were fatally shot during the 2011-2012 school year, 28 in 2010-2011.  319 children were wounded by gunfire in Chicago last year.

As a teacher who has worked in neighborhoods plagued by gun violence, I want people to acknowledge that gun violence does not only happen to children during high-profile mass shootings.  In some communities it happens every day, although a lot less attention is paid. And every single child who is a victim of gun violence was precious to their mother, father, grandmother, teacher. . .

When I worked in Woodlawn, in Chicago, I arrived at school one day during my first year of teaching to find the window broken.  A shoot-out between rival gang factions had taken place in front of the school the night before - thankfully no one was at school.  Police found over a hundred shell casings on the ground.  My students found the bullet later that day, where it had ricocheted off the ceiling and landed in the corner.  I kept it for a long time as a reminder that things can always get worse, and that no matter how rough the day was, at least we were all still alive to try again tomorrow.

A few years later when I worked at Amandla, we had to keep the kids inside at the end of the day because of a shooting reported down the block.  One boy complained about having to stay in, and our vice principal told him, "I am trying to protect you from bullets.  I am not about to let you go out there and get shot."  And the boy replied, "this is Englewood.  This shit happens every day." I still think about him a lot, about where that resignation came from and whether it could ever be undone.

When a gun goes off no one in its vicinity is the author of their own destiny any more.  But in the wake of such events, and among them, we must still try to build the communities that will heal us, and the citizens - adults and children - that can heal our communities. 

A Day in the Life - Teacher

Cutting a sewing pattern for glow in the dark fashion show.

I arrive at school at 8:20, running a bit late even though my commute is only ten feet - my back yard adjoins the playground.  I have a cup of coffee in hand and I load up on breakfast - mini bagels, fried eggs, apples, and leftover bread pudding from yesterday's lunch.

All around me kids are eating breakfast in the upstairs big room and when the are done, the littler ones climb on the indoor jungle gym.  The bigger kids go downstairs and play magic cards, finish homework, or just talk.

At 8:45 I begin breakfast cleanup, which is my job today.  I clear abandoned dishes and wash the tables before folding them up and stacking them on the side of the room.  The room will become a cafeteria again at lunch.  I sweep the floor and am greeted excitedly by an arriving three year old who shouts, "Lauren!" whenever he sees me.

At 8:55 I duck into the office to photocopy a set of problems for junor high class, then I head up to their loft room for class.  Six of nine kids are present - one is sick and two are late, which is an unfortunately common problem with students this age.

We are solving problems related to extending patterns and writing algebraic rules for the nth term.  Here is one: a series of pictures of L-shaped arrangements of squares.  The first pattern uses 1 square, the second figure 3 squares, then 5 and so on.  What is the rule for the nth term?  Everyone sees that it goes up by 2 each time.  Putting it in terms of a variable is tougher.  Do we multiply by 2? That gives even numbers, we want odd numbers.  We don't finish all the problems- we will pick them up again tomorrow.  Some students entrust their paper to me for safe keeping.

On my way downstairs to prepare for my fourth grade class, I pass a crying four-year-old.  He is lying on the floor under a table.  He weeps for the spider man costume he wants to wear, which today is being worn by another boy.  I pull him into my lap.  Kids that age are grappling with the reality that they don't always get what they want.  Nothing upsets them more than scarcity.  I try to encourage him to empathize - won't the other boy be so happy to have a chance to wear the costume? He grudgingly admits this but is still sad.  All I can do is repeat, I know you are sad over and over until he calms down.  Some adults have a saying, "you get what you get and you don't get upset," but here it is more like "you get what you get and it's okay to be upset." I remind him that he will get the costume again on other days, but the concept of other days is hard when you are four.

Fourth grade class begins with multiplication tables, and then we work on extending patterns.  These are much simpler than the ones the junior high students are working with.  The students write the next few terms of a pattern on a whiteboard slate.  Then I let them take turns inventing patterns for other students to extend, which is more mathematically provocative than I had imagined it would be.  Some of their patterns are not fully determined - if they only give the first few terms it is impossible to differentiate between a repeating pattern and one that keeps increasing.  I don't force this vocabulary on them, it emerges naturally in the conversation. Math with groups of students so small tends to be more conversational. There are only five kids in class today out of seven - the other two have gone to the school's land in rural Grafton to have a day in the woods.

I end class by showing them the Fibonacci sequence, which stumps them good. I tell them they can keep pondering it until tomorrow. At the end of class they decide to research it, rushing to the computers to google it. They come to the Wikipedia article and try to make sense of its adult notation. One student finally makes sense of the recursive connection between the terms. They are excited by their discovery and try to stump another teacher.

Ordinarily after fourth grade class on Thursdays I would have a brief class with the kindergarten and first graders, but most of them are at Grafton. I hunt for the two girls who stayed at school and find one of them in the art room.

The room is all a-bustle because students are preparing for the project runway fashion show tomorrow. The theme is "glow in the dark," no I am not kidding. Students pin, hot glue, and sew skirts and wrap-type-things with varying levels of skill and glitter. Glow-in-the-dark paint is being liberally applied. The kindergartner I want to do math with is working with modeling clay.

I ask if she wants to practice counting and she enthusiastically agrees. We are joined a few minutes later by her first grade sister who is already an adept counter. I have noticed that teaching kids to count is surprisingly difficult. There are all kinds of unforeseen difficulties. This particular girl tends to count in the correct order, adhering rigidly to a rhythm with her voice while her finger jumps all over the page so that she arrives at an incorrect number.

Yesterday we practiced by having me dole out marbles while she counted them. I doled them out at a maddeningly irregular pace and reminded her again and again not to count the marble until I put it on the cloth. She seemed to make the connection after a little while but today we are back to square one. Sometimes she counts a single dot twice. Sometimes she skips dots. We are still practicing.

At 12:10, after about twenty minutes of counting, we hear the lunch bell sound. Everyone rushes to put away what they are doing and runs up the stairs to lunch. We eat curry potatoes and chickpeas, corn bread, carrots, apples, and cabbage salad. Plus leftover enchiladas from yesterday. An eclectic, satisfying lunch.

I eat at a table with whatever adults aren't busy helping kids with their food. Today the conversation centers on some junior high students who didn't seem to be taking much ownership for their learning or their behavior toward others. Bhawain, their teacher, is frustrated and despite many talks with these students and in some cases their parents, things don't seem to be changing. Junior high years are challenging everywhere.

 As I finish my lunch a four year old comes over to me as he does every day and asks if we can go on the computer when I am done eating. The kids love to play games with letters and numbers on the Starfall website. The hard part of using the computer is taking turns and the same boy who was crying earlier over the Spiderman costume cries again because he doesn't get to go first. I hold him in my lap again and we play with miniature animals while he waits for his turn on the computer. We make a herd of nine zebras and he acts out battles between a dolphin and a bear.

I often stay with the preschool kids for the whole afternoon but today I go back up to the junior high loft to have some students complete a make-up quiz.  The quiz is about solving equations.  The girls alternate between working earnestly and mock-whispering in a joking attempt to distract each other.  We round out the last few minutes of the day with parodic dancing to melodramatic music - they dance, I am a spectator.  Hair is flinging everywhere and by the end everyone is laughing hard.  Another girl comes up to get her things from her locker and the dancing girls bump and jostle her playfully.  I have a feeling that reminds me a lot of how I felt in school growing up, that the purpose of all of us coming together in the school building was partly to learn but also partly to keep each other company.

After school I have a few minutes of relaxation before we began our staff meeting, late as always.  Our meetings are always very long, this one especially so.  There is a lot to talk about because the school does not have any administrators - all administrative tasks are done by teachers, although everyone does not necessarily do the same amount of work.

We talk about snacks and finding a Santa for the holiday party. We talk about Deirdre's kitchen project to make gingerbread houses next week and whether it would be possible to make egg-free icing for a student with an allergy.  We talk about the ongoing struggle to get parents to pay tuition on time.  We talk about how to best communicate with a three-year-old boy who is deaf in one ear, and what to do about an incident of racist teasing that targeted an Asian-American student.  All of these conversations are long and detailed - since many staff members have after-school jobs this is the one time each week when we are all available to talk to each other.

Then we do our weekly check-ins about how the kids are doing.  Each teacher shares about their homeroom students and there are usually several issues to discuss.  This week we spend a long time revisiting the junior high kids we had talked about during lunch.  Bhawain, their teacher, still feels frustrated but is ready to move from the venting phase of the conversation into problem-solving.  We talk about Monday's council meeting.  Many staff members were unhappy with the motion students passed and feel that the issue was symptomatic of a larger problem with a lack of respect and caring from certain students.  This problematic group of junior high students has been involved in lying, unsafe roughhousing, ignoring younger kids who ask them to quiet down, disturbing classes, having inappropriate conversation with younger kids around, etc.  It is suggested to have another council meeting about these issues, where we would also invite students to speak up about the things these older students are doing that are bothering them.  Many teachers feel this might need to a long meeting because the students in question are not eager to talk or to acknowledge the ways their behavior is harming others. We talk about what we as adults might want to say in the meeting but also about how it is detrimental to have adults control too much in council meetings.

And then it is 7:00 pm and the staff meeting still isn't over.  While I certainly feel that our meetings could probably be more efficient, I am glad that everyone is willing to take the time to have the conversations about the emotional well-being of individuals and our school community.  It is difficult to know how to reach young adolescents sometimes but no one is giving up.

I finally get home at 7:45.  Thursdays are the longest days by far, on other days I come home at 3:45.  I eat crackers and salami for dinner and drink bourbon out of a coffee mug since I don't own a proper whiskey glass. I am tired and a little bit wired from the long meeting.  I do not dread tomorrow.  I remember to put my glow-in-the-dark nail polish in my bag.  I have promised it to some fashion designers.