year of the dog

happy chinese new year! since there are a lot of us who are what judy calls "orphans", we all got together at rosa's to make hot pot and celebrate. it was super fun. i'm pretty sure we all ate too much. then joe made nien gao (kristie's favorite!) and soupy rice balls filled with black sesame, red bean, and peanut paste. and we all pigged out again. yay!

now i have to write out some lesson plans because my advisor will be coming to monitor me tomorrow morning while i teach my first whole class lesson about chinese new year. i was excited...now i'm wondering why i asked him to come by so early in the day...or even week for that matter. boo.

small, small world

on tuesday, i got back from class around 8:30pm and my roommate's small group was over. she mentioned to me that they had a new person visiting their church/small group who was from portland and how she'd told him that i was from portland too. i got excited since i love all things portland. i go into our living room and see this guy...and i realize that he's someone i went to high school with. isn't that CRAZY? in my own living room, i run into someone that i haven't seen since high school graduation. it was beyond weird. small world, right?

and today, chun was in town from atlanta, so a bunch of people got together and had dinner. it was pretty fun...oregon friends + new LA friends. hooray. afterwards, we were at tea station and at the next table were these drunk asian people. so, since i've been in the TEP program, i've been more aware of cultural sensitivity. but, this group of asians was drunk and saying "f--- this" and "f--- that" and i had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing out loud. why? because swear words sound funny when said with a thick asian accent.

TKO

school kicked my butt this week. i started student teaching on tuesday. so i'm in a 5th grade bilingual class. the kids are pretty great. and my guiding teacher is really good at what she does. best of all, she cares about the students. i've heard from my other team members that some of their guiding teachers barely seem to tolerate their students, which is just wrong.

i got sick sometime wednesday/thursday and it's been downhill from there. being sick absolutely stinks. you feel all snotty and everything hurts and everything you do feels like it's in slow motion. but at least my snot isn't green. yay! hooray for small blessings. i stayed in bed all day yesterday and all of this morning until 4pm. i hoping it helped because i have to wake up at the butt-crack of dawn. 6am. welcome to the life of a teacher.

here comes the storm

this is the last weekend/few days that i'll be able to waste time/goof off and stay up late. starting this tuesday, i'll be student teaching monday through friday and going to class in the afternoons tuesday through wednesday. and there's so much to do...at least that's what it looks like now. at the start of every new quarter, i always have this feeling of being overwhelmed. i usually freak out for a week, get all stressed out, and then a week later, it looks manageable. so this quarter, i'm trying to skip the freak out/stress part and just jump into repetitiously declaring to myself that it is all manageable. *crossing my fingers* in the hope that this method will work as it would surely save me tons of anxiety.

i'm super excited to start the student teaching portion of the program, but i'm also incredibly nervous because i don't know what to expect, or what exactly i'm expected to do. i've been assigned to a 5th grade bilingual class - which will be a huge challenge for me, mostly the bilingual part. i just wish that my spoken spanish was much stronger than it currently is. ah well, challenge builds character or something like that.

for those that get the holiday and those that do not, let us remember the wonderful life and legacy of martin luther king, jr.

a new year

happy new year! our winter quarter has started with what i've been calling "math camp." i think i still need a recovery day from my vacation at home. family is wonderful, but sometimes, exhausting.