The Dark With The Light.

Life has been heavy as of late.

At the end of February, the mother of a friend in Senegal passed away. Two weeks later my teammate Tia's father died, resulting in her leaving our team at Mitchell and quitting City Year. Last week, the mother of a close childhood friend died after years of struggle with Multiple Sclerosis. And yesterday? I found out that one of the guys I work with has HIV.

Whew.

I feel too young to have so many friends be losing parents, or to be losing friends myself.

In all of this, I learned that 41% of black Milwaukee men who have sex with men (MSM...a more general term than gay, for those who prefer not to be labeled as gay or who are bisexual, etc) are HIV positive. Let me reiterate: there is a 41% chance that a black man in Milwaukee who practices MSM has HIV. That's a higher rate than for a black, MSM-practicing man in Soweto, South Africa where 17.8% of ALL adults (15-49) have HIV.
(http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/southafrica_statistics.html#76)

And you know what else? My plans for a school garden were rejected by our principal. Apparently a sustainability plan through 2013 just wasn't detailed enough for her.

Needless to say, morale has been low on Cramer Street as of late.

However, my high school friend Kristine is getting married next weekend! Deji and I are going to the wedding and I'm so happy for her. Spring has been slow-coming to MKE but the sun is out today with ample amounts of blue sky. Shenanigans with Governor Walker in Madison continue. Our faculty was notified last week that lay-offs would be announced Thursday or Friday for 2011-2012. We didn't know anything as of late Thursday, so it'll be coming this week. It's a tough situation for everybody.

Last week City Year volunteered with a group in Milwaukee called Growing Power. This guy Will Allen bought three acres on the north side of the city and converted it into a full-fledged farm. There are 12+ greenhouses, goats, turkeys, bees, and some very large fish tanks for perch and tilapia. They grow all kinds of vegetables, herbs, and fruit and sell a lot of this produce during the summer. Growing Power also runs camps for urban kids, exposing them to dirt and grubs and seeds they would never see otherwise. A very cool place, check it out if you can:

http://www.growingpower.org/

Wishing you all well in your various parts of the world.

My apologies for the outrageous delay. Obviously I'm not great at writing in this regularly. Also obviously, lots has happened.

Five of my thirty students have left Mitchell, some for different cities in WI, some for different schools in Milwaukee. We gained one completely new student (he moved here from Florida, poor kid) and two transfers from the more dysfunctional sixth grade class next door. Currently, we have 27 students.

All of the Scott Walker shenanigans have effected us as well. Many teachers in Mitchell are vehemently pro-union, or at least pro-worker's rights, and have been wearing red for weeks. (I still don't know why the color of this protest is red. Is it because it's attention-grabbing? Or because it's Badger colors? Is it a state color that I just don't know about??) Mrs. Koscielak (the teacher I work with every day) has started looking for new positions in other states because the outlook is so bleak for teachers.

I've been crazy busy as a member of City Year's "CE Team" (Civic Engagement). We plan and execute volunteer days in the community and in April Mitchell will be hosting one. I'm trying really, really hard to get a school garden planted during this day but have to jump through all sorts of hoops to even get an approval. There will be more to tell later this week on that. Cross your fingers for me.

....I'm getting kicked out of my planning room for a Teacher's Aides meeting with the Principal...gulp. Adios!

So much has happened.

We had a holiday party at Mitchell a week ago: City Year worked 13 hours, about 700 people attended, and I ate one amazing red velvet cupcake.

In our after-school program this week, we've held "Santa's Workshop", crafts (ornaments and potholders) the students made and then can give to their families.

Class attendance is falling in everyone's classes. Apparently the cold (albeit frigid, icy cold) is enough of a reason to stay at home all day. Not in my house...

Honestly, the past few weeks have been stressful. My roommate Andrew has struggled with depression on and off for years and a few weeks before Thanksgiving it took over again. The week after Thanksgiving found a very depressed Andrew curled up in his bed where, after talking with me, his teammates, and his father, he decided to check himself into Rogers Memorial Hospital, a mental health facility. This was so scary for us all on Cramer Street. After four days in the hospital and a week and a half of intense therapy and counseling, Andrew has decided he is not going to finish the City Year program and is moving home to Kentucky. And Heather and I begin the search (again) for a roommate. So if anyone knows anyone in Milwaukee that needs a place to live...

In school we've gotten some frustrating news too: a middle school student was intensely bullied, resulting in her parents getting involved with our administration. The parents want the media to get involved too, in order to show the public how "bad" Mitchell is at handling bullying. Ohhh boy. And today in particular, one of my student's was crying hysterically because of the hurtful names her friends were calling her. How do I say "Middle school girls are some of the cattiest, meanest girls ever" to a middle school girl?? Parents? Any advice??

On a positive note, our Thanksgiving in Virginia was wonderful and delicious. I get to see my family again in less than a week for Christmas...hurray!

And I wanted to share this:

http://www.cbs58.com/index.php?aid=15221&mid=Making-Milw-Great2

City Year at Mitchell was highlighted by the news last week and my classroom got a lot of face-time. Check it out if you can.

And of course, happy holidays my friends!

Funnies.

Martel is writing a narrative on the Great Depression. He has titled it the Grape Depression.

Jeff wrote a paragraph outlining his ideas for improving his grades and study skills for the next quarter. One downfall: "Math is the weakness out of me because sometimes I don't get it." And to conclude, he writes: "I hope I can get profission, not nonprofission."

One of my students added me on facebook this evening. Oh lord. The protocol on this is to not add them as friends. Do I reply to his message though? Times and dates are documented on facebook messages as well as email, but I'm going to address this tomorrow in-person, in-class instead of a reply. The simple "Hi Ms. Gaynor this is Romeo" cracks me up though...but not as much as his self-portrait of a huge, goofy grin topped with a green baseball hat.

Tonight we had a "Family Math Night." Another one of my students, Joey, was there with his parents, his sister, and three of his nieces. The littlest girl is two and has a perfectly round face and a perfectly perky ponytail. In class Joey is a pretty good kid, but gets off track so easily and prefers to draw instead of take notes or do math worksheets. (Really, who can blame him?) But to see him with these three little girls was the coolest thing to me. He was so, so gentle (he's a pretty big kid) and he knew exactly how to carry the two year old and how to coax marker caps out of her mouth. Adorable.

I've said it a million times and I'll say it again: I adore my students.

Fast-Forward.

Sometimes I feel like I'm sleepwalking through my days and then I wake up and it's November 8. Gracious.

Two weeks ago I got sick with the worst cold I've had since Senegal, though I did get to lay in bed for a day. My students were very curious as to where my voice had gone or if I would be getting them sick too. (Some reacted to this with the typical 'Ew, get away' but one girl asked if I could cough on her so she could be sick too and not come to school...I did not oblige.) Pumpkin carving and an 80s Halloween costume helped me bid adieu to October; the realization that our furnace didn't work greeted these chilly November mornings. And afternoons. And nights. But! As of today, all is fixed: I can wear one sweatshirt at a time and function outside of my bed covers.

My father visited Ethan and I last week, always a wonderful time. He worked a visit to my class into his schedule, and my students loved it. When he asked who wanted to work with cars, every boy's hand shot into the air. He explained where Volvo's engines are used, which was impressive, but the fact that each engine is green was much more impressive. Some of my favorite questions from Room 204:

"Are you famous?"
"How many hours do you work?"
--to which my dad replies "About 55, depending on the week..."
--and Jacob, the questioner, is stunned. "That's way more than 24...how does he do all that in a day?"
"Do you live in a mansion?"
"How many times have you been on a plane?"
--My dad has no numerical answer for this, so he tells Farri more times than he can count and Farri is unbelievably impressed. "I hate planes," Farri says.
And when my students realized the geographic location of Virginia, where my family lives, to Milwaukee, where I work, they stare at me in disbelief: "Miss Gaynor, you fly that far every day just to come to work?!"

We finished WKCE tests last week too, which is the other big news from Mitchell Elementary. WKCE, for those of you who did not go to school in The Badger State, are our state tests and were they ever a huge deal this year. Really, the testing time isn't that intense, just two 45 minute periods two mornings a week and one hour period two mornings a week. Room 204 was impressively focused and again I was grateful to be working with this particular class.

I'm headed to Madison this weekend to be with my old life for a bit; wish me luck with that. <3

A Post Of Thanks

Our Executive Board procured free tickets for the whole Corps to see the new documentary "Waiting for Superman". The film is directed by David Guggenheim (he also did "An Inconvenient Truth") and it is "a deeply personal exploration of the current state of public education in the U.S. and how it is affecting our children." (http://www.waitingforsuperman.com)

Five children are profiled, all of whom reminded me either of my students or myself. Most go to public schools of various sorts and all care deeply about their education. (Daisy's story was particularly moving.)

Anyways, I don't want to write to completely endorse the film, though I think people should see it to at least start discussions around public education in America. I want to write to say thank you for my own education. Many of you were and are directly involved in it and not until this year have I fully realized just how much work it takes to get a child to love learning. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for reading to me so much that I could read faster to myself than you could read to me. While I've always been a little too proud of that, it's a pretty weighty gift that took an untold amount of your patience. So thank you for all the Goodnight Moon's, American Girl chapter books, and the Little Hungry Caterpillar's. Thank you to the rest of my family for setting our education standard so high: my grandmothers who went to college even though higher education for women was not the norm; my grandfathers' Master's degrees.

Knowledge is power and with power comes responsibility. I am grateful for my education--grateful that my schools' were never falling apart, never too overcrowded, always had academic options, clubs, languages, music, art, friends. I have been so blessed, there's no other word for it. And the best part is this year, the year that pushes me to see that my background is not the norm in my country, far from it in fact. The power I've been given is being used to show me the responsibility I have--we all have--to each other and to our future. We can't push the inequalities to the background anymore. We have to act, to be responsible to our community. We can't wait for Superman.