Injury time

For the first time in my life, I am entirely incapable of walking independently, thanks to a knee injury from soccer last Tuesday. The doctors don't think it's too serious, but can't tell much for certain until the swelling goes down and the x-rays are looked at more closely. In the meantime, I've been hobbling around on crutches and feeling incredibly thankful for all of the following things:

Roommates who drive me to the doctor and carry my things around and share their Aleve and ice packs

Students who write priceless sympathy cards and offer to be my helper in the classroom

Colleagues who carry my lunch from the microwave and give medical advice and offer rides and knee braces

A sister and brother-in-law who trade me cars because I can't work the clutch and do all the work setting up tents and Thermarests and things so I can still go camping

Friends who get my meals and refreeze my ice and carry my coffee and give up their seats and chase all the stray balls while I play one-legged ping-pong

Thanks, guys. For the help, and for helping me realize how much more comfortable I am with helping other people than being helped. It's a humbling experience. And one I will remember even when it's over. Hopefully that will be soon.

Home Alone

One housemate is out of town for a wedding, the other just moved halfway across the country, and the new one won't arrive for another week, so it's just been me and the dog. I've been taking full advantage of the situation: playing bad pop music on the piano, practicing the mandolin, turning up my "top of your lungs" mix and singing, talking to the dog in Mandarin, having zucchini cake for breakfast, eating the cream cheese icing straight out of the bowl in the fridge, making random things for supper out of fresh garden veggies and questionable leftovers, leaving dirty dishes all over the kitchen, coming home from soccer late at night and making lots of noise. Ah--good song's on. Singing time.

The Story of E

About a year ago, I wrote about The Story of B, and how my story wasn't B's exactly, but that I didn't know quite what it actually was.

I started thinking about my story again more intentionally this summer, after reading Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest and realizing that most of the things I love and do and think are connected to what he calls "the Movement"--the confluence of the social justice and environmental and indigenous peoples' movements. It began with a mental web, during one of the summer's backpacking trips, of how all the books I'd read in the past several months connected in some way to those bigger ideas. But it was more than just the books; I started thinking about the college courses I'd taken, the jobs I'd had, the organizations and activities I'd been part of. They all had something in common. They all had me in common. It sounds obvious, I know, but it gave me a different lens for looking at who I am and what this story of mine might be.

I wanted to see what it might look like, visually, this diagram of things I've read and studied and thought about and valued, so I sat down on the floor one day and scribbled pages of ideas connected with arrows all over pages, until the mass of words and lines was so chaotic that even I couldn't tell what I had written. So I went online to prezi and made my first-ever zooming presentation. Forgive my lack of expertise with the program. Even with the prezi, not everything related can sit nicely side by side, and I had to stop drawing arrows because they were covering up too many of the ideas, but it's a start. I didn't create a path for you to follow in viewing this diagram because it not only is not linear, but it has no beginning and no end. Too many branches and forks. I don't have a path for a web. Explore as you wish. Press the play button down there, and zoom and move.

There are many more ideas that could be added and arrows that could be drawn, but I had to leave it somewhere. It's a work in progress. Not just the presentation. The story itself. Here you have it:

Revenge of the junk in the cupboards

Spoke too soon, apparently, about the virtues of stashing stuff away in cupboards. As I was putting away the grocery bags today, I found a branch in the back of the pantry. Pulled it out...and pulled and pulled...and found:



a potato tree.

Victory of a pack rat

Confession: I have three cupboards in my office filled with junk that I can't bring myself to throw away because I think one day, someday, it might be useful. Today was someday. I finished planting the fall crops in the garden today and used the junk closet not once, but twice.

Twine that the thrift store guy used to tie a dresser (now fully functional, with the 100+ Disney/Barney/Lisa Frank stickers removed and the drawers glued back together) to my car is now tying up the pear tomatoes:


And an old license plate is now keeping water and soil from escaping through the corner of a garden box where the planks had come apart:


Finally, a valid response to the people who tell me I need to throw this stuff out.

Short and sweet

That is the theme for upcoming posts. Ambitious thoughts for long, deep entries rarely make it out of my head and onto the screen. With the end of an adventure-filled summer and the beginning of a new school year just days away, it's time for the annual taking stock of life and reevaluating priorities--and writing is one of them. Four sentences. Done.

Just a city girl

But I'm not, even. At least I didn't think so. And then I came back here to my college town for a wedding and realized just how far I've digressed from my small-town mindset, and it made me a little sad. My road trip buddies and I pulled into town late afternoon after two days of driving and found the brother-of-a-friend-of-the-grandparents-of-a-friend, who showed us into the part of the house where we'd be staying. When I asked about a key, he said, "Oh--well, we never lock our doors around here, but if you want to, keys are somewhere..." Once I dumped my stuff inside, I went for a walk along the Mill Race to get the blood flowing in my legs again. Apparently half the town of Goshen had the same idea, and I was soon reminded that in this alternative universe, you are indeed supposed to make eye contact, smile, maybe even say hello to everyone you pass. And I still recognized a good number of them. Between that walk and First Friday and breakfast at Rachel's Bread on Saturday morning, I ran into dozens of people I needed to catch up with--old college friends, professors, siblings of friends, friends of siblings, the families of a brother-in-law and a college boyfriend, a coach, a tennis teammate, a stand partner from college orchestra, a neighbor. It's humbling to realize that even after being gone for four years, there are still people here who know me and love me. And this small-town girl loves them back.

Aging

I've recently had a hard time keeping track of my age. It's not that I can't remember how old I am, more like I think of my age as staying constant while everyone around me seems to keep getting younger in comparison. I remember, as a kid, thinking that 40 was ancient...now those are my peers. And all these athletes, actors, musicians that everyone wanted to grow up and be like--it's too late. We grew up, and now they're all younger than us. It sunk in a little more, going back to my college town to visit people over spring break this past week, just how much my life has evolved in the four years since I graduated. I could walk around campus and not look so different from all the students, but then I'd sit down and file my taxes while my cousin plowed through abstract algebra homework, or design curriculum while my sister's friends stopped by the dorm room to talk about boys. And then I came home and spent a very productive day doing all sorts of grown-up-feeling things: getting new rotors in the car, installing new wiper blades, replacing light bulbs, analyzing the month's finances, buying a pitchfork for turning the compost pile and picking up a load of free manure for the garden. And it felt wonderful. I still get nostalgic sometimes for college days, sure, but I have no desire to actually go back and live them again. Just this morning I came across a pile of emails from the spring of my senior year of college, and just looking through them brought back those gut feelings of uncertainty, possibility but instability, the stress and pressure of making the decisions about jobs and relationships and location after college that would shape the rest of my life. The dread of saying goodbye to friends, family, community, of entering into entirely unfamiliar territory. Korea, Botswana, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Honduras? Life ahead was a thousand question marks. It took me a couple seconds sitting here to remind myself to breathe, to relax, to remember that I don't have to deal with any of that right now--and that all of those tough decisions brought me right here. And this is a very fulfilling place to be right now. Real. Rooted. And don't worry, I'll still go play kickball with a bunch of other grown-ups in the park tomorrow. We're never too old to stop having some little-kid fun.

Stop and smell the goose poop

I took Moo on a walk this afternoon. It's spring break, and it was sunny and 70 outside, and I had spent the whole day in a hotel basement at a language acquisition seminar (which actually was wonderfully inspiring and made me want to run off and start my PhD in Second Language Acquisition...but that's another story), so it was time for my outside fix.

It's really springtime here. We'll probably get a 2-foot snowstorm before the end of April, but today the daffodils were blooming and the trees were budding and everyone in the neighborhood was in the park riding their bikes and flying their kites and walking their dogs and practicing their soccer and playing their tennis. And Moo kept stopping every 30 seconds to sniff around at goose poop and worms, poking through the dirt and reeds, and I kept trying to drag him along, realizing that his harness was not designed to pull him forward, only back. So I resigned myself to going at his pace: meander, backtrack, sniff, explore, repeat. And I started noticing all kinds of things. The patterns of the wind on the lake. The mallards sleeping on the shore. The kids on the porch swing across the street. The freshly plowed flowerbeds. The shiny red buds on branches above my head. The little girl with her daddy buying paletas de fresa. The grandpa teaching a kid to fly a kite. Isn't that what a walk's supposed to be? Feeling a part of it all? Not hurrying along with headphones stuffed in my ears.


It reminded me of school. Here are our kids, inquirers by nature, stopping to poke around at every little thing that fascinates them but that we as teachers all too often fail to notice. And we yank them along by the leash, powering through the curriculum, making stops only for the sights we know will reappear on the standardized tests, dragging them past all the things of real interest. Goose poop isn't on the standardized test. (Or wait...is that all it is?...no, no, that would be something a bit different.) No wonder so many of our kids seem to lose their natural curiosity, to become apathetic toward school in general. No wonder so many of our teachers get burnt out with it too. That's not the way it has to be. Which brings me back to the seminar. Ahhh, education that matches the way brains actually learn. More on that another day.

Photo update

Here's a link to the facebook photos I just posted. If a picture's worth a thousand words, this more than makes up for my lack of blogging in the past month. Enjoy!

On the potential benefits of flat tires

Just because I have a car now doesn't mean I'm giving myself permission to give up biking every time it's a little bit cold or snowy. They plow the bike trails in Denver, after all, even if they don't do the roads. I successfully made the commute with no wipeouts, but did manage to get a flat tire 1.2 miles from school. Boo. And then my pump broke when I tried to reinflate the tube--the plastic pieces got a bit brittle in 6-degree temps--and left the tire completely emptied of any air that had previously been in it. So I walked (and ran, now being late for professional development) the rest of the way to work. And once I got there, I was reminded of just how much I love my coworkers. Two offered me rides home, one ran home over lunch and brought back two bike pumps, another tracked down the pump from the school gym, and another, after looking at my 4-times-patched tube, ran to the bike shop down the street and got me two new tubes. And one more, stopping by to make sure I had everything fixed, offered, albeit jokingly, to follow me in his car to make sure I got home. Even if I can take care of myself, it's nice to know there are people looking out for you.

The co-op

Happy New Year! Apologies for my three-month hiatus in blogging. Life's been busy (and that is a serious understatement.) Turns out I've been doing an abysmal job of finding the balance I talked about back in September. One of the many things keeping me busy (but also very much inspired) has been the realization of a summertime vision for a food co-op. It's now been up and running for about three and a half months now, and I'm thrilled with the success so far.

The basic vision: to organize a group of people who love good food and the making of it, and who care about where their food comes from, to trade homemade value-added food products. I wanted to bake bread, freeze jam, dry fruit, culture yogurt, can tomatoes, pickle cucumbers, dehydrate backpacking meals, make applesauce and tofu and salsa and granola and pesto...but I knew that as soon as the school year started, I'd be lucky to have time for even one of those things. The idea, then, is that if I make a large quantity of just one item to share, I can trade it for a variety of other foods without spending the time actually making them all myself.

After bouncing the idea off a number of friends and feeling out interest, we ended up with a group of 14 and met to flesh out visions and logistics, and the co-op was born. Essentially, we meet for a food exchange twice a month, bringing shares for everyone once and receiving shares both times. Emily went into a bit more detail about logistics in her blog, so I won't do it again here. James also set up a blog for the co-op itself, where all of us involved can post photos, recipes, questions, etc. I just posted a collection of food photos from the past several months there, so check them out if you like. And of course, feel free to ask us questions on that blog, or here. I'd love to see where this idea goes if people start running with it in different directions.

Balance

My dad asked me over the phone this weekend how I was doing at keeping my essential agreements. I told him I've been doing a great job of balancing work and play; the problem is that I've done it by working just as much as before and playing twice as hard. Not a sustainable way for me to live, it turns out. Lack of sleep and far too little down time turn me into the kind of person I don't want to be. I think I'm improving, though. Last Monday was about as bad as it got: I put in a full day of teaching and planning, went to a meeting on how to train other teachers to use their Promethean boards, biked home for just long enough to change out of biking shorts and grab a banana and a swimsuit, rushed off to a kickball doubleheader, ate the banana for supper between innings, headed straight to our string quartet business meeting (in a hot tub, naturally), made it home by 10:30, ate some real food, put the mute on my violin and practiced with miniscule bowstrokes for Tuesday's gig so as not to wake up my sleeping housemate. Today, I did not go a single other place after work. I came home, picked raspberries, read a book in German for fun, ate a leisurely supper, played piano, talked to an old friend on the phone for an hour and a half, and wrote in my journal. And posted a blog entry. And am going to get nearly a full eight hours of sleep. Let's see if I can make this trend continue.

Essential Agreements

At my school, we don't have rules. We have essential agreements--the understandings we've established between students and teachers, paras and supervisors, staff and administration, to create the healthiest environment for us all. This year, after a summer spent putting a lot of things in perspective, I decided that in addition to my essential agreements with my students, I needed some for myself. For a perfectionist in a profession where you can never be perfect. For a teacher who needs to remember that she is many things other than that.

Photos and back to school

I'm totally losing at this I-have-a-bedtime game. Tomorrow marks the first Monday of the school year (for teachers, at least; students don't come until Thursday.) To celebrate the fond memories of summer, though, I uploaded a new album of photos to my Picasa site. Enjoy! And now, to bed, with an alarm clock set. Qué pena, ¿no?

B Goes to Sunday School

Everyone who's asked me for reading suggestions in the past six months has gotten the same advice: Daniel Quinn's The Story of B. It's a thesis-based novel, part of the Ishmael trilogy, that draws on anthropology and theology and ecology to challenge the unsustainable way we're living. Best book I've ever read. Not the best-written, or the most beautiful, or the one that makes me feel the best, but certainly the most urgent, powerful, inspiring, challenging. One of those where I had to lie flat on the floor with my eyes wide open for awhile after I finished, thoughts coursing through my brain.

Before you go flipping to your public library's website to reserve a copy expecting the same sort of experience, read this disclaimer: B would not have had the same sort of impact on me had I read it five years ago. It wouldn't have had the same impact had I read it five years from now. Had my previous experiences and ideas been different, this book might have inspired only outrage or confusion or defensiveness. Know that that's what it might do for you.

That's also why I was shocked when a man from the Mennonite church I attend asked if I would be willing to facilitate an adult education discussion series on the book. For those of you unfamiliar with Daniel Quinn's work, his ideas and characters are not exactly ones you would typically find in a religious setting of any sort. B is the last person I expected to be invited to church. I hesitated. He encouraged. I accepted. B went to Sunday School. People read the book. We discussed, questioned, challenged. I began my attempts to build up something new and different from the rubble of cultural and religious foundations that now lies at my feet.

The conversations have continued in many different contexts, with friends and family and anyone I can get to engage in discussion on visions of our role in the future of this planet. The energy I've found out there for finding better ways to live--related to the Quinn philosophy or otherwise--is nothing less than awe-inspiring.

Last weekend, nine of us got together for what turned out to be a wonderfully intense and intensely personal discussion. One of the discussion members asked me as I was leaving if I was B. I said yes, yes I am. But after coming home and attempting to go to sleep, mind still working as full-speed as if the coffee we drank had been caffeinated, I realized that I don't want to be B so much as E. E as in Erin. The story of me.

Maybe in another few years I'll have figured out what that means.

Cambodia in photos

Well, here I am, home in Denver again, and finally getting my trip photos uploaded and captioned. Click on the Photo Albums link on the right of this page, and you'll see a new album called Cambodia 2010. You may have to put the slideshow on pause and flip through them manually because some of my captions are a bit long...my apologies. Enjoy!

Countdown

Time for the lasts of everything. Leaving Cambodia in exactly 12 hours. (OK, maybe that's a little optimistic.) Got a head start on flipping my body clock by staying up till 4am watching the World Cup semis last night. I'll post photos sometime after I'm back in the States, but for now, I'll sign off and enjoy these dwindling hours to the fullest and try not to cry too much during goodbyes before beginning the 40-hour journey home. Leg cramps, I can feel you already. Wish me luck.

Magic marker magic

Sopheak and Malachi are married--congratulations, sister and brother-in-law! The wedding was beautiful, and I felt so honored to be a part of it. My own personal highlight, though, was the chance to play violin and sing as part of the band alongside Jenny on keyboard.

If any of you read my blog while I lived here in Phnom Penh, you know who Jenny is. She was 9 years old at the time, now 12. She was my host sister, Khmer teacher, game buddy, cultural interpreter, friend. And piano student. When I first came in 2007, she wanted so badly to learn to play the piano, and I said I'd gladly teach her--except that there was no piano. That fact didn't seem to faze her in the slightest, and when she insisted she wanted to learn even without an instrument, I decided that that kind of motivation deserved to be given a chance. I asked her for a black magic marker and drew two octaves of a keyboard on a white piece of paper, and with that, our piano lessons began. We practiced note names, fingerings, and little songs while I sang the notes that she played on the paper keys. After a couple weeks of this, I came home from work one day to find an electronic keyboard in the living room and Jenny grinning from ear to ear. Her parents, apparently, were as impressed as I was with her dedication and enthusiasm, so they invested in a real instrument.

The lessons continued somewhat regularly, with Jenny learning incredibly quickly and becoming really quite good, until I went back to the States in 2008. Every time I called or emailed my host family, we discussed the piano progress. In the spring of this year, I got an email from Seiha, a dear mutual friend, who told me that Jenny had started playing keyboard with the worship team at church on Sunday mornings. I thought of our magic marker piano and almost cried.

When Jenny sent me a facebook message asking if I'd play violin with her while she played piano at Sopheak's wedding, I knew I had to find a way to do it. Thanks to a kind violinist friend here in Phnom Penh who lent me his instrument, I got to join the band and became Jenny's student as she taught me the melodies of the Khmer songs we would play while I scrambled to commit them to memory, as there was no written music except for chords and lyrics in Khmer script, which I can't read fast enough to keep up with a song.


After hours of practicing, and some purely fun jam sessions in the living room with a few other sisters singing and a brother-in-law joining us on guitar, we made it to the wedding day. Jenny and I played a duet as Sopheak walked down the aisle, and the rest of the band joined us for a whole variety of pieces during the ceremony and reception, from traditional Khmer wedding songs to I Could Sing of Your Love Forever to Celine Dion's Because You Loved Me. Pisey sang, I harmonized on violin, and Jenny improvised complicated piano accompaniments to it all. All that from a little sheet of paper and one very magic marker.

Lessons learned

Two lovely women in Prey Veng transplanting rice seedlings.

After a short but lovely two-day trip out to Prey Veng province, I'm back to my host family's place for one more week, helping to prepare for tomorrow's wedding and trying to fit in everything else I want to do while I'm here. Yesterday I spent all day at the Royal University of Agriculture, my old workplace, amazed, as usual, at how absolutely normal it felt to be back there again. Same sunny office, same barefoot classrooms, same mouthwatering spicy pork at the Organic Restaurant. New bathroom, though, miraculously enough, although the running water was not running yesterday, and the old bucket and cistern of water for manual flushing are now nowhere to be found...ah, the joys of "progress."

In any case, I got the inside scoop on recent university happenings involving accounting crises, strikes, administrative changes, and much other drama, which, I think, for political reasons, I'd better not expound on here. Let's just say it made me truly appreciate the flawed but functional educational system that is Denver Public Schools.

In addition to hearing about university current events, I got to teach two first-year English classes, courtesy of the current English teacher in my old position. Crazy, you may say, to choose to work during my summer vacation, but I was really curious to experiment with TPR Storytelling methodology in a Cambodian university context, and who knows how long it'll be before I get the chance again?

I taught both two-hour classes, walking the students through the processes of Total Physical Response, personalized question and answer, asking and acting out a story, drawing events on a storyboard, and retelling them to partners. I was thrilled with the creative and entertaining stories they came up with, and with the near-100% engagement and participation. I don't often get that in my Spanish classes at home. Afterwards, though, when I asked the students for their opinions on the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of language teaching and learning, I was reminded just how big a disparity there is between my perceptions of effective learning and theirs.

Jocelyn and one of her students act out the story the class is creating.

TPRS is designed to make language acquisition as fun and effortless as possible. For my Cambodian students, however, if they don't have to work hard and seriously, if their brains don't have to break a sweat, they feel like they're wasting their time. A number of them voiced concerns that although this sort of lesson may have been fun, it was keeping them from progressing in their textbook. While it is my humble but professional opinion that they gained far more from storytelling than they ever could have with a textbook, they couldn't see any tangible progress, no pages turned, and although they enjoyed the time, they were anxious to get back to what they considered "real" learning: explicit grammar instruction, drills, and worksheets. There has to be a third way, something that incorporates comprehension-based methods appropriately into a Cambodian university context. Into any context. I mean, I could spend the rest of my life answering that question.

Hmmm. Maybe I will.