Peace Up, A-Town Down!

Hello, friends!

If you are keeping up with me on either facebook and/or twitter you have no doubt found out that I have indeed arrived to Atlanta and have been happily (well...maybe not necessarily happily...) living and breathing Teach For America for the last week and a half. Life in the ATL is crazy. All 183 Memphis corps members are here, along with the 185 Greater New Orleans corps and the nearly 300 Metro Atlanta TFA people too. For those of you keeping track, that's nearly 700 of the approximately 5,000 2011 corps members living here at Georgia Tech learning how to teach effectively and become transformational leaders!

If I could use one word to describe my days here at institute it would be...LONG. For reals. Long days coupled with hard work lead to a very sleepy Lizabelle at the end of every day! Here is a quick glimpse for those of you interested in what a "day in the life" of an incoming corps member looks like...

5:30am- My alarm goes off. I refrain from yelling expletives about the fact that I am awake before the sun is up. I hit snooze. Usually twice.

6:15am- I leave my apartment. For how early we have to get up every day, it certainly does help that everything that I need, especially in the early morning, is no farther than a 5 minute walk away from my apartment. I leave my 8th Street West apartment at 6:15 and arrive to the dining hall by 6:20am.

6:20am- I stand in line and fill up my lunch box (courtesy of Georgia Tech dining services) of my boxed lunch for the day: ham and cheese sandwich, sunchips, banana, oatmeal raisin cookie, and a coke. I get to the end of the line and stuff a few napkins in the side pocket, and then go into the main cafeteria to eat my breakfast *sidenote: one of the reasons I absolutely LOVE working with TFA is of how efficient they are. They are constantly trying to improve their systems of operations, even if what they are doing is already working! I seriously never have to wait more than 2 minutes to get my lunch in the morning. In the name of 700 corps members, that is pretty darn impressive.

6:25m- I arrive in the cafeteria and find my friend Elizabeth to sit with. I usually eat a bowl of cereal, fruit and get a cup of coffee to go. I leave the cafeteria at 6:38 (TFA has clocks on the large screen TV in the dining hall, with a countdown to when your assigned but will leave. Mine leaves at 6:45am).

6:40am- I am on the bus to go to Bethune Elementary School! It is absolutely IMPERATIVE that I make it on the bus before 6:45. Any corps member who is not on the bus at their assigned time must pay for and take a cab to their assigned school *second sidenote: I have had the high privilege of watching corps members R.U.N. to the bus every morning because they were going to be late. It's HIGHLY entertaining. And thus serves as my motivation to get up at the ungodly hour of 5:30 every morning.

6:45am- Bus leaves for Bethune. I put my iPod in for the 15 minute drive and use this time to collect myself and intentionally do not socialize with anyone. Bus time = me time.

7am- We arrive at Bethune. Last week we sat in various sessions about curriculum, literacy, diversity, lesson planning, etc. for 9 hours every day. However, since we are now officially teaching, we have prep time from 7-7:30. Kids start arriving at 7:30

7:30-8am The kiddies come! Everyone is down in the cafeteria for breakfast. Today we basically just hung out with our students and started to build relationships with them *sidenote number three: my kids called me a vampire today because they thought my eyes were so green. Compliment?

8-8:45 Academic Intervention Hour. Today it was just us explaining the rules, but normally this will be some kind of academic tutoring time.

8:50-10:20 My co-lab (read: partner) and I leave our kiddies in the trusting hands of our reading teacher counter parts. We attend various professional development sessions. Today was about planning effective methods for our lesson plans.

10:30- teaching time! My partner and I each teach 45 minutes of math every day. My schedule is a little wonky since all the 2nd graders go to lunch from 11-11:30. So my teaching schedule is technically teach from 10:30-11, lunch from 11-11:30, and finish my lesson from 11:30-11:45. Not exactly convenient, but it is what it is.

11:45-12:30 My partner teaches the next objective in math while I observe. Today, the second I sat down quickly drained A.L.L. energy I had from my body after I felt I could finally relax after getting my first lesson out of the way.

12:30- kiddies leave, we eat lunch. Finally.

1pm-4:30pm: other various professional development workshops and work time for our groups and classrooms. This time can vary between literacy sessions, lesson planning clinics, CMA (corps member advisor) group time, or planning and grading for tomorrow's lesson. Work time with our CMA and all of our co-lab is really invaluable, especially when we are in the building and have access to a lot of excellent resources.

4:30- Busses leave Bethune. We arrive back on campus usually 15 or so minutes later back at Georgia Tech and I change into sweats and/or jeans and a t-shirt as quickly as humanly possible *sidenote cuatro: because today was our first day of teaching, we were greeted and cheered off the bus by all of the interns that are working here in ATL for the summer with freeze pops and our 2011 corps t-shirts! It was very a la Young Life camp welcoming committee. Made me happy.

5pm- Dinner(ish) time...sometimes I eat closer to 5:30 of 6, depending on who is free and how much I have to do that night. I usually end up eating with my friend Elizabeth or Tammie, but I never worry about going alone to eat because I know that I will at least see 1 other Memphian eating there at the same time. Its inevitable.

5:45- dinner is over, and the work begins! Sometimes (like tonight!) I am able to be SUPER productive and can finish in anywhere from 3-4 hours. Sometimes I am not productive and I end up going to bed at my limit (midnight) without all my work being done. It just depends. But now that I am getting into the swing of things and understand more and more each day what is expected of me, its getting easier for me to estimate how much time my work will take me every day. For the past couple days I've parked myself at the resource room, which is, as I've told many of my friends here and anyone else who is associated with TFA that it is simultaneously like crack-cocaine to a teacher and God's gift to institute. It is basically a room with every manipulative, worksheet, idea, and supply that you could think of. And 4-5 staff people ready and willing to help you find something whenever you need it. You can make free copies of worksheets and check out manipulatives for 3 days at a time. I'm sure while I'm at institute it will be as close to heaven as I can get :)

Whenever I finish working- I leave the resource room and head to bed! Sometimes I stop at the copy center to print and run things off. I'm getting pretty savvy at navigating our copy machines and can now make double sided copies like a pro!

Sometime after finishing all of that I go home, shower, and fall into my bed.

Like I said, life here is a little cray-cray. But I'm learning a TON about teaching and a TON about the organization. Which I love. I know that my time here is not wasted and will only help me when I get to the classroom in the fall.

Just so you know I L.O.V.E. encouraging text messages, emails, facebooks, tweets, snail mail...anything! If I don't respond to everything it is only because I am probably running around somewhere in Atlanta trying not to miss my 6:45 but or using behavioral narration to manage my classroom! But I love and appreciate every one of you! The work is long and hard, but it is good and worth it. I keep hangin' in there, taking it one day at a time :)