"...may your next choice be your best choice..."

Wow starting a new blog. I have had other blogs before, but that was back in high school and before when all I used them for was telling people about my life. Why make this one? I think this blog will document a few things. For one, I can discuss what I am doing at school with the kids. This will serve as my reflective journal. Also, I can use this to discuss my personal, professional, and spiritual growth. This job gives me the opportunity to develop all those things. Finally, I believe in being a learner for life, so I am still reading novels and trying to further my English studies. Here I can comment on what is going on in those books.

I am excited about school, but I am also nervous. Student teaching was such a huge struggle that I almost gave up on teaching all together! I am having fun doing all the preliminary planning. Our curriculum for 10th grade is laid out like this: First Quarter--Short Stories, Second Quarter--Research Paper, Third Quarter--Poetry, and Fourth Quarter--Julius Caesar/Animal Farm. I have two 9th grade classes that I am teaching grammar and composition to. I have what I think will be fun lessons.

Teaching at a private school has cost me about $5,000 a year, which is about a 15-20% decrease. For some reason, that doesn't really bother me. I was offered a job at Winnebago and didn't want it. I think God has called me to work at Rockford Christian. It will be so nice to not have to worry about keeping my faith a secret like I had to do at Guilford. It is nice to know that I will never have to teach something that goes against my beliefs. I am excited to do devotions with my kids. My faith has changed every aspect of my life, and I hope that I can show that to them and also encourage them to let it do the same.

In my own personal studies, I am currently reading Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. My favorite literature is African American Lit, so I wanted to read it. I hated the first Hurston book I read (Dust Tracks on a Road) but I tried to go into this with an open mind. This book is soooo much better. She touches on so many things like the hierarchy within the African American community. The top of the food chain is the white man, then white women, then black men, and then black women. Hurston also touches on cringe theory where people within a society have been beaten down by the outside world so much that they start to turn on each other. This is evident in the belief that those with lighter skin or white characteristics are more beautiful than those with darker skin and black characteristics.

Hurston writes, "Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times, just as she was cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness. Like the pecking-order in a chicken yard. Insensate cruelty to those you can whip, and groveling submission to those you can't."

We see this is society today, we all attempt to dominate whoever we can. That is why the gay community is so oppressed at this time--they are currently on the bottom of the barrel. It is a terrible cycle that perpetuates discrimination.

She covers so many other issues such as education, community, the fine line between oppression and freedom when it comes to an all-black city, and so on. Way too much to write in this little blog. I am really enjoying the book...and I guess I have to lay off Hurston now.

32 days until school starts!