to blog but this week has been a difficult one for me. It has certainly been one filled with a whirlwind of emotions. Sunday, I left church service with MBR/C to come home to the apartment hours later and breakdown & cry over the phone with my sister, Gator. I'd been feeling like lately, I just couldn't get things in my life straight. It's a feeling of uneasiness, distress and worry that is oftentimes, quite difficult for me to express; it all builds & eventually, I breakdown & cry. And when I say that it builds, I mean that months and months of mess accumulate and then I suddenly explode. Now that I think about it, crying has always been difficult for me to do. You know, some people can do it instantly. The water works seem to come on during movies, at weddings or even while reading a book. However, it doesn't work that way for me. My father died of a heart attack when I was 11 and I didn't even cry at the funeral. It actually took days for me to show any emotion, but it did happen. So on Sunday, all the pain I'd been feeling about loads of things-not getting hired at Girls, Inc., being broke as eva & having crappy credit to not knowing what it is that's suppose to be my calling when it seems that everyone else in the world does, finding a good job and (sadly) my being single for the third year in a row-unraveled, hot tears spilled out of my eyes & down my face, and I cried as I gushed everything to my sister. It felt so wonderful to let it all out, to truly purge my mind but my soul still felt a little heavy. But the most awesome thing Gator did was to remind me of my faith, the one thing that's always been constant in my life. Later on that night, I had a long, much needed conversation with Him that truly helped to lift the burdens that had been weighing me down for quite some time.
My first two weeks as an academic tutor for GEARUP(Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs), a program at my alma mater that's designed to help Chattanooga middle & high school students get to, pay for, and succeed in college, and I couldn't be more pleased with myself.
I'm an English tutor at Howard High School of Academics & Technology, an all black school that was established in 1865 by the American Missionary 
Society. The school has a bit of history attached to it with it being the first free public school in Hamilton County. In 1873, Howard School was incorporated into the Chattanooga School System and it was named after General Oliver Howard, Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Its curricula includes courses in English, Foreign Language, Math, Science, Social Studies, "Career", Fine Arts, PE, and JNROTC --classes that most of us had in our own high schools years ago. However, there on block scheduling. Traditionally, schools schedule six or seven 40- to 55- minute classes per day. These classes usually meet for 180 school days per school year but with block scheduling there are fewer class sessions scheduled for larger blocks of time over fewer days. For example, in block scheduling, a course might meet for 90 minutes a day for 90 days, or half a school year. Does this type of scheduling have any advantage over more traditional scheduling methods? Schools that have tried it believe it does but from observing the behavior and attitudes of some students, I think not (but I won't get into all that in this post)...
My first day at Howard was an experience...the students were a mess; rude, disrespectful, cursing and talking back to their teacher and not paying any attention to instructions it seemed. It's a new semester for them so I suppose they were just testing her any which way they could to see how far they could go in pissing her off for the New Year. One female student came into 2nd block late and she was pregnant. I really wasn't ready to see this. I mean, it's 9th grade for crying out loud! You're immature, acne prone, uneasy around your peers but not pregnant. Of course, times have change and it's blatantly obvious that today's children, today's high schooler's aren't the similar to those 4 or 5 years ago. It seemed that the 3rd block students were uglier, louder and ruder and 4th block seemed to transcend what I'd thought about the previous blocks.
During 4th block, I watched these 2 boys constantly taunt one of their classmates. I mean, just picking at him for no reason at all, throwing paper wads, pen tops and pencils a the boy and name calling. Just watching this was working my nerves but I just wanted to see what the other boy would do before I said a word. When he took it upon himself to move away from the punks, I made my decision to speak up and them them to quit the foolishness & be quiet. One of them gave me a little lip service but I ignored him and minutes later, he was quiet, watching the movie and answering the questions his teacher had given him. The next day that I saw him, he apologized for being disrespectful. Ah, 1 point for me; 0 for the teenaged bullies EVERYWHERE!
From the academic perspective, the classes watched the animated movie Antz to supplement the reading of George Orwell's Animal Farm. Pixar's Antz isn't as child-centric as it seems for it deals with slightly more complex themes like conformity and war, similar themes fou
nd in the Orwell classic. I was amazed that Animal Farm had found its way onto the English 9 reading list. I don't think I read it until maybe my sophomore year in high school some years ago. For those that may have forgotten what the book's about (or have never even heard of it before), Animal Farm is a satirical novel, a modern fable if you will about a group of animals who oust the humans from the farm they live on and run it themselves, only to have it corrupted into a brutal tyranny on its own. It was written during World War II and published in 1945, although it wasn't widely successful until the late 1950s. Many events in the book are based on ones from the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. I re-read the book this Christmas and found it far more enjoyable than when I was 16 and slightly oblivious. Of course, these students are having a difficult time finding any interest in the book at this moment...
I spent a lot of time just observing the students, trying to figure out the approach I wanted to take in getting to know them and having them respect me as an adult. You know it's so easy to look into the faces of these students and see the nothingness that the our society expects from them.
At first glance, they're unruly, ghetto teens-they have no respect for themselves, each other or even the administration. You look a little deeper, there's more to shock you-some of them are academically behind, emotionally unstable and utterly immature. BUT, what if there's more? There's got to be more, right?
If only these students could get a glimpse into their futures, see what happens if the status quo is actually accepted and not challenged. Would they then show each other a little more respect? Apply themselves? Prove society wrong about its expectations of them? Or are they too far gone to even know the difference, to even know that there is more for them but that they have to start caring more aobut themselves to really achieve...
Lately, I've wondered if I can make some difference in their lives some how. I suppose that time can only tell.
Lately, I've been doing alot of thinking about the past...as an undergrad, I absolutely detested Mondays. I loathed Mondays. Mondays seemed to have gotten here so fast. Of course, that was especially true when you'd just gotten off of one job at 7 am to rush home, shower, maybe have some coffee and redress for another job that began at 8:30. A few summers ago, I was working the 11 to 7 shift as a night auditor at a hotel downtown on the weekends. Actually, all the work that my job entailed-checking the books for the evening, writing down wake up calls for the next morning, helping guests who mysteriously locked themselves ot of their rooms get back in-got done by 12 or 12:30, so I'd try to read for summer classes or write a little before I fell asleep at the front desk.
I remember one weekend, when I'd just gotten into a lengthy chapter on defamation in my communication law & ethics textbook, in no more than 30 minutes, I was fast asleep, my face resting on the open pages of my book with my hands folded in my lap. That was like THE BEST SLEEP I'd gotten all week! Sometimes the security guard named Lester would wake me up. He'd flirt, tell the most obscene jokes or even try to get my number. Lester was a 32-year-old balding black man who wouldn't face that fact that he'd never have enough hair for a baby fro in this lifetime.
My first night on the job he asked, "What you takin' up in school?" I told him English, specifically writing. "Aw shit, then, I got to watch what I say 'round you," he said, as he leaned over the front desk, staring me in the face. "I've got to use proper grammar around you, don't I?" he asked me in what had to be the worst impression of an Englishman I'd ever heard.
It irritates me that once I'd tell people what my major was, they'd feel the need to change the way they were speaking all of a sudden as if I was the grammar patrol. Putting that aside, Lester was a pretty cool guy once I got to know him better, he watched out for me, made sure the building was safe and often asked how my week had gone.
Monday through Friday, I worked from 8:30 to 4 as a day camp counselor at the Y. I had 5 & 6 year-old-s, leading sing-a-longs llike "My Hat Has Three Corners" and "Herman the Worm." I was often far more excited about the sing-a-longs than my group was so I ended up embarrassing myself day after day. If I wasn't leading songs, I was screaming at the top of my lungs, "Please, sit down Shane! Don't lock Kristina in the pool lockers! Get quiet or you'll lose your swim time!" all day until it was time for me to go to class. I got a break from 11 to 2 to come back to campus for a communication class I was taking that summer. By 2, I was back at the Y listening to kids question and moan, "When are we swimming? It's hot! I'm tired!" until I got off at 4.
That was what my summer was like. I never would have imagined that I'd be working 2 jobs to support myself but I was (and I'm still doing it now). I'm officially an adult with responsibilities and financial obligations. There's rent, a cell phone, storage and utilites to be paid for. But I've got dreams and in order for them to come true one day, I've to pay my dues and continue to live One Day at a Time.
Can express everything that you're feeling at a given time. I've been feeling the old school hits alot lately and I just had to share these lyrics with whom ever will read them and possibly feel me: 
Wild Flower She faced the hardest times you can imagine And many times her eyes fought back the tears And when her youthful world was about to fall in Each time her slender shoulders For the weight of all her tears And a sorrow no one hears Still rings in midnight silence in her ears Chorus:Let her cryfor she's a lady Let her dream for she's a child Let the rain fall down upon her She's a free and gentle flower growing wild And if by chance that I should hold her Let me hold her for a while And if allowed just one posession I would pick her from her garden to be mine
And what better way to begin the year, than with a few resolutions, personal commitments that I've made to help mold me into a more delightful person for 2006.
Did you know that the name comes from the fact that these commitments normally go into effect on New Year's Day and remain until the set goal has been achieved, although many 
resolutions go unachieved and are often broken fairly shortly after they are set. But not for me! I think that lots of people break their resolutions because they didn't set real, attainable goals in the first place. Mine are very realistic.
I have 3 New Year resolutions: 1) Eat sensibly & increase exercise; 2) Work on rebuilding worthwhile, healthy relationships 
with two people I readily wrote off in 2005; and 3) stop being bitter and cynical about love & relationships w/the opposite sex. I think that these are healthy, attainable goals that I've set for 2006 and I intend to achieve each one of them.
Lessons that MUST be learned in Relationships...2) Slower is better. Why are we in such a hurry when it comes to being in relationships? It's as if we're in some race to get to the good stuff-deep emotional connections, sexual gratification, long-term commitment-before either party is truly ready for these things. When we don't slow down and truly enjoy the now with a particular person, we tend to get caught up in a storm of emotions and uncomfortable situations like unrequited emotional attachment, infatuation, confusing love for lust, girlfriends/boyfriends that you didn't know about or planning where the relationship should go in a certain amount of time (a big no-no often committed by females) or even unhappy, quickie marriages that last more that 6 months. We've all heard the saying that "Patience is a virtue" and it's obvious that people should take heed to this more often. So, take one day at a time to really explore the relationship that may(or may not) be developing with someone special.
