seriously.

I can't decide which I'm amazed by more -- Charles Wesley's hymns or just Christmas carols in general.

"Hail the heav'n-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Son of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings,
Ris'n with healing in His wings"

seriously.

overwhelmed - in a good way, I think

Well, this week is Thanksgiving break, and I get a whole glorious week off of school. Yet somehow my emotions never quite match my situation. I should be ecstatic, but I've just been feeling kind of blah. Not important.

Anyway, I have spent a LOT of time on facebook today, befriending my fellow ∆ 2011 CMs! It's overwhelming and amazing to meet so many awesome people that I'm going to be sharing the next two years of my life with. I've met a few people that have turned out to be friends-of-friends that I didn't even know about!

My task tonight is to learn how to do long division with polynomials. Wish me luck!

emotional roller coaster much?

Since getting into TFA, I've been on quite the emotional roller-coaster.



I got the email, and I was so relieved that I came as close as I ever have to hyperventilating. I was sitting on the floor in a hallway in the Humanities Building, and I sunk down against the wall and almost started crying

The relief gave way to shock and disbelief. This still hasn't worn off, but there's been some sub-categories of emotions since then.

Once I found out about all of the tests I have to take and the math I have to learn, my relief gave way to abject panic. I have to learn calculus, which I haven't even studied, and I haven't thought about math in YEARS.

The panic sort of wore of and I realized that I can study, so I ordered a test prep book and bought a graphing calculator, one of the last things on EARTH I thought I'd ever spend $120 on.

While waiting for my test prep book to arrive (hopefully it will tomorrow), my mood has become restless anxiety. I want to start preparing as much as I can, but there's really nothing helpful I can/should do right now. I'm not moving for seven months, and it'd be pointless to do a lot of the things I want to do.

And the dumb TFA blogging website won't let me create a blog, which I've been dying to do since like May. Maybe it's God telling me to CALM DOWN.

I'm bored at the moment, and yet I still don't want to go to work in an hour. And I'll probably be all cranky at work and want to leave.

Blech.

applying to Teach For America?

on my way to my final interview!!!

The application for TFA is no laughing matter – it’s a months-long process, with lots of anxiety and impatience. But it’s well worth it.

My tips for you:

Before the application:

-read the website, and make sure you’re on board with what TFA stands for
-work on a draft of your resume. Try to keep it one page, talking about your leadership experiences, academic achievements, and extracurriculars. They have sample resumes posted on TFA’s website – I just followed the format of that one.
-work on a draft of your letter of intent. It’s supposed to be under 500 words. I wrote several (8) drafts before I found one that was half decent.
-make sure you have your SAT scores and grades handy; you’ll need them

Written application:

-have other people read your resume & letter of intent
-be consistent throughout the whole application – you’ll be asked about it during all stages of the application process
-check and double-check everything you write, just in case

Phone interview:
-RELAX; my interviewer was SUPER nice, and it felt like a conversation more than an interview
-be ready to talk about every item you’ve listed on your resume
-have responses in mind for the standard job interview questions about yourself – strengths & weaknesses, etc.
-if they don’t call you at your appointed time, don’t freak out – just email admissions and they’ll take care of it. This happened to me twice!
-have a big window of time open before and after your interview, so you’re not flustered
-have a thought-out question to ask at the end, if you want.

final interview:

**order your transcripts early! If you don’t, you’ll only have about 2 weeks to get them in, which could be nerve-wracking**

* make sure you force yourself to eat beforehand, even if you feel too nervous to eat! The nerves will eventually wear of, and it’ll be hard to think when you’re starving!

Lesson plan:
Make sure you:
-can do your setup in one minute, including writing your name, the grade level, the subject, and the objective of the lesson. I had to practice this several times before I could write fast enough.
-TIME YOURSELF. It seems obvious, but it’s really important. Now matter how awesome your lesson is, it makes you look really bad if you go over time. 5 minutes goes by fast – try to make sure you can get through your lesson plan in 4 ½, just to be safe. They’re really strict on time – 5 minutes isn’t just an approximate estimate.
-make sure everything in the lesson is age-appropriate and realistically feasible in the classroom setting
-have a very specific, measurable objective
-be familiar with what they’re looking for in a lesson plan (I highly recommend reading teaching as leadership)
-practice your lesson plan in front of other people – they’ll spot things that you won’t
-get comfortable with your props, and make sure they work. -Don’t rely too much on technology.
-practice it over and over and over again. I did at least 3x a day in the weeks leading up to my interview, and each time I did it, I grew more and more comfortable.

Group problem-solving activity: Don’t freak out too much if you don’t say a lot – just make sure you get a few good points in, and tie in the articles if you can.

Written activity: take your time and answer carefully.

Personal interview: be ready to answer the standard job interview questions, and be ready to talk about everything on your resume. Don’t be surprised if they ask about the same things that your phone interviewer asked for. Make sure you frame your answers in a way that shows that you have the 7 qualities that they look for in a candidate – that’s what they’re looking for out of you during the whole interview. What helped me also was having some ideas of specific things I wanted to do in my classroom.

What I did to prepare (besides what TFA explicitly told me to do):

-read Teaching as Leadership (and the articles, obviously)
-arranged to miss class on the day of my interview (it was ALL DAY)
-ordered and uploaded my transcripts
-submitted my placement preferences
-read through the state standards for first grade and decided on something to teach on (you can pick any grade. It just looks really good if you have an objective that’s specifically aligned to the state standards)
-researched age-appropriate vocabulary/activities
-re-read TFA’s mission, etc. on the website
-wrote a page on how I embodied each of the qualities they’re looking for:
-critical thinking skills
-leadership & achievement
-ability to influence and motivate others
-perseverance in the face of challenges
-organizational ability
-respect for students and families in low-income communities
-desire to work relentlessly in pursuit of TFA’s mission
(I made up an acronym, LAPCROW, so that I could remember/keep them in mind)
-made sure I had specific examples from my recent past of each quality


Obviously you don’t have to do all this – I’m just listing things that helped me in my application process.

and it was all worth it

10,000,000 bread baskets made

1,598 deposit envelopes methodically stuffed with 10 bills

60 paychecks from Mimi’s Café

194 nights at home with my cats, plugging away at homework

34 dinners out with minimal food ordered

2 approximate per-day visits to mint.com

324 bus rides

6 missed bus rides

4 months of TFA-obsessing

1 invitation

ALWAYS good to hear.

or read.

"Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods 'where they get off,' you can never be either a sound Christian or a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

The first step is to recognize the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day." -C.S. Lewis

Abraham Lincoln

was the most amazing man. Seriously. Here's just what I underlined from Lincoln's Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk. Really good book by the way.



"A person with a melancholy temperament had been fated with both an awful burden and what Byron called 'a fearful gift'. The burden was a sadness and despair that could tip into a state of disease. But the gift was a capacity for depth, wisdom -- even genius."

"Often understood as an emotional condition, depression is, to those who experience it, largely characterized by its thoughts...Oppressed by these thoughts, people often become hopeless."

"...Lincoln struck out into his own intellectual territory, slashing through thickets of medical theory, philosophy, and theology. He arrived tentatively at his own idea, that melancholy arose from natural, sometimes beneficent forces. Talking about it in plain human terms was his first step toward claiming his own ground as a person who, through no fault of his own, needed help."

"It is a signal feature of depression that, in times of trouble, sensible ideas, memories of good times, and optimism for the future all recede into blackness."

"In contrast, Lincoln said, harsh condemnation could no more pierce a man's heart than a rye straw could penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise."

"Calvinism saw human beings subjected to a harsh and wrathful God; Lincoln proposed that people could shape their own lives by the exercise of will."

"Drunkards, Lincoln said, should be 'pitied and compassionated, just as are the heirs of consumption and other hereditary diseases."

"...in particular, he named three kinds of troubles that could beset a person with a nervous temperament: poor weather, isolation or idleness, and stressful events."

"Suffering was not a punishment from beyond or a malevolent infestation of the soul. Like the earth turning on its axis or energy passing through a conductor, it was a part of the natural world, to be studied, understood, and, when possible, managed."

"[The avoidance of idleness as a treatment of melancholy] has been often repeated. The idea is to try to set the mind on a concrete project, something outside oneself. Otherwise, the morbid, self-accusing, hopeless thoughts can take on a life of their own, creating a frenetic powerlessness, the mental equivalent of an insect trying to work its way out of a spider's web."

"What is striking about Lincoln's therapies is that they did not dampen, but rather highlighted, the essential tension of his life. Had he chosen to take high doses of opium, he might have found relief from his pain, but at the expense of a great loss of energy. Had he devoted himself to a guru or medical practitioner -- spending months each year taking the water cure or attaching himself to a talented mesmerist -- he may have found comfort in someone else's prescription for him, at the cost of a vision that he'd already come to understand -- that is, his desire to do something meaningful for which he would be remembered."

"Lincoln didn't do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy. The problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work."

"What distinguished Lincoln was his willingness to cry out to the heavens in pain and despair, and then turn, humbly and determinedly, to the work that lay before him."

"He is an example of what William James calls the 'ripe fruits of religion' - also called saintliness and enlightenment. Earlier I described it as transcendent wisdom. People who are guided by a sense of something larger than themselves will look past the petty concerns of the self - the wounded pride that comes from personal insult, for example, or the wish to seem stronger or better than other people."

"Lincoln was the first white man of power who did not manifest superiority"

"When a depressed person does get out of bed, it's usually not with a sudden insight that life is rich and valuable, but out of some creeping sense of duty or instinct for survival."

"If one desires to 'stir up the world,' it is easy to be impatient with work for the sake of work. Yet no story's end can forsake its beginning and its middle."