Week 9

Work

A bit about my day to day responsibilities at work…

Before the students arrive, I do a lot of running errands (getting snacks, going to the bank, buying craft supplies at Michaels) for Theresa. I also help her write grants and am in charge of lining up the Verbum Dei volunteers. I really enjoy the exposure to both sides of this non-profit; I plan the programming but also help out with development, volunteer recruitment, and all other aspects that keep the organization alive.  That is the beauty of being so small, but it also means that every aspect of running Urban Compass ultimately falls on Theresa, which is stressful to say the least. I really appreciate the value of my role as her right-hand person because she simply could not do everything by herself.

We pick the students up around 2:30 at 112^th St. School next door.  After an hour of playtime and snack, we divide the students into 3 rooms by grade. I am in charge of the Kindergarten and First Grade classroom, where I have 14 students each day.  Never would I have ever imagined myself as an elementary school teacher, but now it doesn’t seem nearly as scary as I thought!  I adore my students, but definitely use a lot of “tough love” to show that. Keeping them on task doing their homework is so hard. They are all very social and energetic…I still can’t imagine teaching 20 of them for an entire day.  Every five seconds someone is yelling “Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!” or grabbing my arm or hitting someone else or running around the room (or worse, running out of the room).  It’s mayhem, but I love it.  Even when I was student teaching, I preferred a chaotic classroom to a dead quiet.  This chaos, however, is not comparable. To top it off, I have 3 sets of twins in my class – 2 of which are identical. You can imagine the confusion that causes!

Now that I have learned the ropes at work with the kids, I am starting to put a lot of time into planning the academic program for my class each day.  I’m finding the whole process of learning to read simply fascinating.  Each day, depending on their homework, I tutor students about rhyming, blending sounds, sight words, and decoding.  Everyone is on a different level, which is tough.  I try to put together individualized activities for each student, which is really fun for me. 

Community

Monday:  Our support people, Maria and Krista, brought over dinner and a guest: Sister Eileen, a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet.  Sister Eileen lives in a community of three sisters right around the corner from us. Her house is literally on the other side of our block! After a delicious meal, Sister Eileen spoke to us about community living; she has 63 years of experience living in community so could speak quite well to the subject. She gave some great insight into community life. I was surprised and comforted that many of the things she spoke about apply directly to our JVC community, despite our drastic demographic and age differences.

Tuesday:  Maria gave our house two tickets to see a play downtown at the Ahmanson Theatre. After drawing out of a hat, Cara and I were the lucky recipients! We went to see Leap of Faith, a musical starring Brooke Shields.  It was phenomenal! The story was about a traveling revival made up of a pastor and a gospel choir that preyed on small towns across the country to make money.  The music was outstanding and our orchestra seats were amazing.

Wednesday:  Our FJV friend, Rose, came over for dinner. (You may remember we attended her glow-themes 30^th birthday party in September.)  Rose kept us entertained all evening talking about her JV experience, her time in NY, her job, and the dating scene in LA.

Thursday:  For community night, we watched Food, Inc, a documentary about our nation’s food industries and the many secrets that are well kept from the consumer. Afterwards, we tried to talk about how we can be conscious consumers and chose products that are not processed unethically (meaning that the animals, workers, and earth are not harmed in the processing).  Unfortunately, this is very hard to do on our small food budget each month since local, organic, free-range, etc products are typically more expensive.  This, of course, if part of the problem since so many people in the country live on budgets similar to or smaller than ours. We vowed to start doing more research on prices before we shopped, and to try to act on what we learned in the movie.

Friday:  TGIF! Zach, Julie, and I met up with Cara and John (of Casa JD) for happy hour downtown. Afterward, we hung out at Casa JD which is our closest neighboring LA house (in Koreatown). It was great to spend some time with them just hanging out because we hadn’t seen most of them in a few weeks!