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ten years gone

August 26, 2008 · Filed under God, Marriage, Teaching, Travel

Today is my birthday. I am twenty seven. This is the first birthday that I have thought, “I’m getting old.” I am wondering if I can still classify myself as being in my mid-twenties. I don’t think so.

I have loved my twenties. It has been my best decade. Besides celebrating my birthday this month, I am also celebrating the time when I became a Christian. It was seven years this month.

Today I have been thinking about all my birthdays and have been able to recall some details from the past ten years. I don’t have the best memory so I thought it would be good to write them down for posterity’s sake.

1998: I turned seventeen. This was the first week of my senior year of high school. I had a pool party at my house on Red Gum. It was the first big party that I had as a teenager. It was a big deal for me. I gave out invitations, invited girls and boys, and had a great time. It was an innocent party. My parents were there and stayed in their room for most of the night. I have good memories of that party.

1999: I turned eighteen. It was my first week of college at UF. Christian had just been born earlier that week. I was living in Simpson Hall with my random roommate, Michelle, and had just finished rushing a sorority. On my actual birthday, the sorority was having some sort of induction and I was wearing a white skirt and a white eyelet shirt.

2000: I turned nineteen. I was planning on moving out of the sorority house and ditching the sorority, which I did. I celebrated with my friend Tara over at Campus Lodge.

2001: I turned twenty. Jen and I had just moved in to an apartment at Treehouse Village. I had just become a Christian a couple of weeks before when I had been home for summer break. I had been baptized in the ocean at Jupiter Beach. I was starting my last year of college.

2002: twenty one. I had just graduated from college and moved to Orlando. Brynne was starting graduate school at UCF and we moved in together. I went to Wet n Wild for the day. I was on the hunt for a job and ended up starting soon after as a server at Buca di Beppo.

2003: I turned twenty two in Amsterdam. I had been working at the hostel for less than a month. We had a birthday celebration at dinner and ate homemade cake. Johanna, the manager and my mentor for the year, was at dinner that night. I received a big teddy bear pillow from my Shelter mates.

2004: I was still in Amsterdam and had just returned from my travels to Italy and Poland. Madelinde made me a cake and I had a delicious Greek meal for dinner. I sprained my ankle that night running up the stairs of the Shelter City and flew to Finland the next day to see Johanna, my roomie.

2005: I turned twenty four as Chad’s girlfriend. We had only been dating for a month and we went out to dinner to a Mexican restaurant with Kathy, Sarha, and Rosie. I was living with Kathy and Sarha at the time. I had recently lost my job at House of Hope and was unemployed. Soon after, I got my job as a Language Arts teacher at Freedom.

2006: I turned twenty five as Chad’s fiance. We had gotten engaged in June, on our eleven month anniversary. We went to my parent’s house for my birthday weekend and Pat and Dale came along as well. We went out to dinner at Cheesecake Factory and Pat bought me a Nintendo DS. I had just started working at TFA and was living in the “inside-outside house” with Sarha.

2007: I turned twenty six as Chad’s wife. We were living in our cozy little place at Park North. We went to Babbo’s in College Park and had dinner with Tina, Erin, Jessica, Hannah, Richard, Wes, Suzanne, and Natalie.

2008: Here I am today, recently having moved from Florida to NYC. Chad and I met at Central Park for a picnic lunch. I am unemployed and hoping to get a job offer this week. We are moving out of the mouse house/cub at the end of this week into our own place.

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Uncle Tom’s Cabin

February 16, 2008 · Filed under Books, God, Social Justice, Teaching

I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the first time three and a half years ago. I started right before I left Amsterdam, and finished it after I returned to the States. It is, to date, my favorite book. I appreciate so much the character Tom who has a walk with God that is extraordinarily exemplary–he is a man, enslaved by whites, who responds to his situation and to his oppressors with compassion, love, and forgiveness. He prays for their souls, and weeps for their brokenness. While I draw strength and inspiration by his witness, this attitude that he portrays did garner criticism from African-Americans who felt that Tom was too passive, and should have shown more dissatisfaction with his position. In fact, to call someone an “Uncle Tom,” is an insult that connotes a black who is submissive and content to be in a subservient position. As I read the book, I don’t see Tom as content with his position in society–he deeply mourns the brokenness of his situation–but his faith allows him to withstand the horrors of slavery as he trusts that his God is preparing a place of peace for him in His heavenly Kingdom. Tom understands that the whites who commit these crimes against Him do so because they do not know the love of Christ and are in spiritual darkness. Ergo, Tom seeks to demonstrate that love to them, and actively chooses to live by the way of the cross, which includes loving those who hatefully persecute him.

When I agreed to teach American Literature this year, I was most excited about teaching this book. We are in the middle of it now. I have had the chance to do some research on the author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and have really enjoyed learning about this woman of God who responded to the call on her life to use her writing talents to speak God’s truth about the slavery issue that was poisoning the U.S. in the 1800s. I was reading through the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mid-Nineteenth Century United States by Moira Davison Reynolds and was blown away when I read about Harriet’s experience that led to her beginning the book.

“According to members of the Stowe family, at church Harriet had a vision. She saw a Negro being flogged viciously at the order of his master. As the man died, he prayed that those who had wronged him would be forgiven. Harriet participated in the communion service in a mechanical, distracted manner, and afterwards walked home. Later that day she wrote out her vision, using names. The saint-like man was Uncle Tom, the owner was Simon Legree, and his henchmen were Sambo and Quimbo. Then she added something: the Christ-like action of Uncle Tom made converts of Sambo and Quimbo.”

Reading that Harriet, a Christian, received this vision moved my heart to praise God. It may seem odd to think that one way God responded to the slavery issue was by moving one of His children to write a book that would challenge and anger people unto laboring and speaking out for change, but that is exactly what I think He did. Not to say that the book was the one and only thing that caused the end of slavery, but certainly it was used as one way that contributed to the dissolve of slavery. God heard the cries of the slaves and He responded. He demonstrated His faithfulness to justice when He delivered the slaves from the institution of slavery. As Harriet reminded us in her preface,

“…the great cause of human liberty is in the hands of one, of whom it is said:

“He shall not fail nor be discouraged

Till He have set judgment in the earth.

He shall deliver the needy when he crieth,

The poor, and him that hath no helper.

He shall redeem their sould from deceit and violence,

And precious shall their blood be in His sight.”

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The Kite Runner

January 2, 2008 · Filed under Authors, Books, Teaching

At the urging of my fellow English teacher, Erin, and my student who I adore because she adores English class, I read The Kite Runner. My student, having read and loved the book herself, very much wanted me to read it and brought me in her copy to borrow. It was a really cool experience to have the English student recommending and lending a book to the English teacher. I brought it with me to my parent’s house for the holidays, and engorged its near-400 pages in less than 3 days.

My review of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner:

The story begins with our protagonist, Amir, a child of ten, living luxuriously in Kabul, Afghanistan circa 1970. These days, I learned, were a fruitful time in Afghan history, the days pre-Taliban. Amir lives with his philanthropic, widely revered father, Baba, and in a hut on their property lives Baba’s lifelong servant, Ali, and Ali’s son, Hassan, who is a year younger than Amir. Hassan is Amir’s best friend, although Amir never quite admits that to himself or to others due to the fact that Hassan is a Hazara, a race of people looked down upon by the Afghans. To the reader, Hassan is immediately adorable–he has an unfettered loyalty to Amir, an infinite propensity to forgive, and he is the fastest “kite runner,” which means that when a kite is brought down during a kiting competition, he can track the falling kite with more success than anyone. As Amir takes the reader into various engaging stories, situations, and recollections of his childhood, we become acutely aware of his shortcomings: his cowardice, which glower in a sharp contrast to Hassan’s endearing qualities, and his insecurities that are constantly triggered by Baba’s near-rejection of him. In Amir’s attempts to be embraced wholly by his distant father, he goes to lengths that are both pitiable, reprehensible, and that ultimately leave him haunted and disgusted by his actions. In his suffering, and as he learns to deal with himself, a self he abhors, I found myself aching with Amir– for who can’t relate and bemoan their past and events that happened that we forever long to go back and change, but tragically can’t?

The story fluidly takes us into Amir’s adulthood where he is living in California after he and Baba escaped the Taliban regime years before. Here, Amir pursues his writing passion, one of his passions that was never quite understood or accepted by Baba. Amir marries, has success in his writing career, but is still unable to free himself from his long-past transgressions. Fortunately, and as with all truly good stories, an opportunity comes for Amir to find redemption when he is phoned back to Afghanistan and he finally finds himself willing to step outside of his weaknesses in order to “be good again.” After years of living in shame and self-contempt, Amir willingly enters into multiple dangerous and sacrificial situations in order to be a man that he can live with. In one scene, Amir comes face to face with his and Hassan’s childhood tormentor, a neo-Nazi maniac, named Assef, and is able to conjure up the courage to make a moral–and violent– stand against Assef’s torturous actions against Hassan’s son.There are ways that the idealistic reader will be left disappointed: Hassan and Amir don’t get the chance to meet as adults, and the while the novel ends with hope, it does not evade the reality that life does not always leave relationships squarely worked out. A deeply visceral, emotive novel, The Kite Runner adeptly accomplishes multiple tasks: it exposes the foreign reader to the Afghan world, it connects the reader with their own nagging sins and their consequences, and it leaves the reader hopeful that, within a lifetime, God will give us opportunities to transcend our shortcomings and become someone better.

Mark Twain

November 8, 2007 · Filed under Authors, Books, Quotes, Teaching

Today I began to prepare lessons for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Somehow I have managed to get this far in life without ever having read this classic. From my cursory study today, my interest has been piqued. Here is a quote of Mark Twain’s that I read today that contributed to my excitement to learn more about him and read his book.

Patriotism “is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive ‘owners’ who each in turn, as ‘patriots,’ with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of ‘robbers’ who came to steal it and did—and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.”

“I have no race prejudices… All that I care to know is that a man is a human being – that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.”

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The Scarlet Letter

October 28, 2007 · Filed under Books, Teaching

My 11th grade American Literature students just finished The Scarlet Letter. Overall, I would say that they didn’t enjoy it. The language obscured the meaning for them, and I would compensate for this with in-depth class discussions. They were slightly taken in by the scandalous love affair. I read it in high school, but as I approached the book 10 years later as a teacher, I had no expectations, no memories, and no real associations with the book. At the tail end of teaching it, I can say assuredly that I loved the book this time around. Reading it as an adult was a much more meaningful experience than when I had read it in high school. I’ve found this concept to be true many a time while teaching, and while it makes my job more fulfilling and exciting for me, it also leaves me with a somewhat defeatist attitude in terms of what I’m actually bestowing upon my students. Here’s my logic: I don’t remember much of what I learned in high school–I feel that it is only as a result of teaching that I’ve been forced to internalize the ideas and knowledge that I must have only committed to short term memory in high school. So if this is my case, I assume that this will be the case for my students, and this line of thinking is discouraging. I find some semblance of peace in the refuge of this thought: While they may not remember exactly what they learned or what a book was about, I’m involved in training their brains in how to learn, and how to think critically.

So if any of you read The Scarlet Letter in high school and hated it or don’t remember it, may I suggest revisiting it as an adult.

Native Americans

August 21, 2007 · Filed under Quotes, Teaching

I began my American Literature course with several lessons revolving around Native Americans. In addition to reading a creation account and the Iroquois Constitution, we also read articles about the history of the Native Americans post-European arrival. I feel a deep sense of sadness for the way they were treated, and am horrified yet again by the sin of man that can be so dominant that it leads to genocide in a quest for self-aggrandizement. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve learned more about Columbus then I’ve ever had and have really come to abhor the actions of that man. He was a bad man. As such, I can no longer think of Columbus day as anything other then a deluded sense of American history and an honor that that has been rewarded to an undeserving man. Sure he “discovered” America for white Europeans, but what about the kind of man he was? What about his character? Let me just name but a few of his many offenses: raped Indian women, took slaves, stole whatever was desired from the Native Americans, including gold, cotton, and food. When you compare him to another man that we ‘give a day’ to- MLK Jr.- and consider the quality of man he was, it’s hard to see how they could ever be put on any sort of common ground by both having their lives honored with a national holiday remembrance day.

Consider this quote: “No sensible Indian person,” wrote George P. Horse Capture, “can celebrate the arrival of Columbus. Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history”

Here is another quote that sends chills down my spine when I read it. There is something very powerful about the voice that comes through in these words; maybe it’s the history that emerges from it that is so often overlooked and under-regarded:

“Away back in that time-in 1492-there was a man by the name of Columbus who came from across the great ocean, and he discovered the country for the white man. . . What did he find when he first arrived here? Did he find a white man standing on the continent then? . . . I stood here first, and Columbus first discovered me.”

– Chitto Harjo, Creek

On an end note, we read the short story, “Indian education” by Sherman Alexie, which is a fictional account of a young boy’s experiences growing up on an Indian reservation. I recommend it. It has moments of humor where you must laugh but, in its depths, its story and characters evokes a very real, visceral response and invites the reader to feel compassion for the Native American experience in modern day America.

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My summer job

July 31, 2007 · Filed under Teaching

Yesterday my summer-long commitment ended. In May, I had been hired by a parent to tutor her son who was required to be in tutoring in order to have permission to go to the next grade. I tutored Kyle for five weeks, 3 times a week. As our time came to a close yesterday and I said goodbye to him and his mother, I asked him to come by and say hello the first week of school. The truth is that I had grown attached. I felt somewhere between a mom and a big sister in the way we related, and over the course of the five weeks, my affection for him grew and I could feel that I very much wanted the best for him and wanted him to come to believe in himself. Maybe it was all those hours that we spent across from each other going over direct objects, prepositional phrases, and many other grammatic principles that he won’t use much, if at all, after middle school. Maybe it was writing essays where I saw his passion and love of skateboarding, boogie boarding, and skim boarding. Perhaps it was when we would discuss where to find all natural food and he told me that he was “pretty much a vegetarian.” But probably it was when we would tease each other and he grew comfortable enough to call me a ‘punk’ at times like when I picked up a quarter on the floor and insisted that it was mine, when really I knew it was his.

Those days of tutoring turned out to be a very fulfilling way for me to spend a large amount of my summer. Kyle will go to the next grade, he will now not have to be retained. Yesterday he earned an A on his final exam. And what is more is my sense that I touched his heart and brought good moments and memories into his life.

And here I am, the day after sending him on his way, left with a little hole in my heart, missing my student, and reminded what is so cool about being a teacher.

sky

Archive for Teaching

ten years gone

The Kite Runner

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