An honest reflection about seeking out balance.

I want to be the kind of person who has it all together, who can take on the world and navigate the daily ins and outs of life with ease and grace. But, as often happens when September ends and October rolls around, I start to feel like I am failing at balancing my professional life with my personal life. I begin to feel a little overwhelmed with myself. I go into each school year with professional and personal goals, expecting each year to get a little easier than the last, and yet it is still challenging and I struggle. 

At some point, everything implodes for no particular reason and yet a million reasons at the same time, and I become a pile of messy tears, questioning every little piece of this life that I have forged. It happens. Those moments when all seems wrong in the world. Even though I can logically take a step back, look at my life, and see so much goodness, in that moment of depression, everything seems out of place. In that moment, I dream of moving away to New York City, all by myself, to work in a coffee shop. Or of living in a cabin in the woods, just me and my dog, going for daily runs and hikes and cooking simple meals. Or of going to study abroad in Paris, but ditching class every day and just wandering around the city, only stopping to sit at outdoor cafes eating crepes, baguettes, cheese, and wine. I can be quite ridiculous at times.

I read this post yesterday about cutting everything you are doing in half to see what is really important to you: "Just the act of cutting what you’re doing in half forces you to really dissect what you’ve taken on... Force yourself to really look at what you're currently doing and streamline everything down to what’s most important for you as a person who can only doing so much... Focus on what makes you the happiest and do that thing/things really well." 

As a teacher, it is pretty much impossible to cut the workload in half, but this did get me thinking about what is really important to me both personally and professionally.

Personal:

-be a good wife

-spend time with family

-spend time with friends

-make new friends

-go on little and big adventures

-seek joy

-take photos

-keep a personal blog 

-run

Professional:

-Advisory: make it a family

-Humanities: help kids develop as readers and writers, make learning fun, form personal relationships with students, open their eyes to the world around them and empower them to make a difference in it

-Team: make it a family, connect projects to the outside world, get students out in their community

-Peace Leadership League: make it a family, support students in their projects, host a peace conference, create a presence on campus, travel to Costa Rica with students

This was a week of highs and lows. High: So many wonderful birthday celebrations. Low: Realizing that I am at work most days for nine hours and don't really get much lesson planning or grading done during that time. High: I'm really starting to get to know some of my new students and connect with them. Low: I had to take my car into the car place six out of the seven past school days (they let me take my birthday off) just to pass a smog check. High: I have been experiencing some awesome runs lately. Low: We took our dog to the vet and paid a ridiculous amount just for an ear infection. High: I got to dress up as a ninja turtle and Napoleon the pig from Animal Farm in the same week at school. Low: Our record player is dying a slow death. 

I guess the stress of life has been weighing on me and finally needed an outlet which resulted in too many tears expended yesterday. Sometimes it happens... and then life goes on, and I continue to seek out that ever elusive balance once again.

(My advisory and me dressed up as Ninja Turtles for our Advisory Olympics competition on Friday.)

The International Day of Peace: high school style.

Friday was the International Day of Peace, so my elective class, the Peace Leadership League, set up activities for the week within our school day and stepped into classrooms to lead them. One of the goals of the week was to be more mindful of our actions and do random acts of service, which students throughout the school kept track of on little slips of construction paper, and then we made a long chain  and hung them up in the front of our school. It wasn't a super huge event, but I was so proud of my students, especially when we sat in a circle around all of the little random acts of service and they shared out what it felt like to become a peace leader on campus all week. I have this quote that I like to share with my students from Gandhi, "If we are to teach real peace in this world... we shall have to begin with the children." This idea is essentially why I decided to go back to classroom teaching after grad school, but in reality, if we are to reach real peace in the world, we only have to have the children teach us. 

That first photo was my view of the sunrise outside my classroom on the International Day of Peace, which was an inspiring way to begin the day. Sometimes there are special rewards for waking up before the sun.

One of the best letters I have ever received from students// One of the worst days of teaching I have ever had.

Well, today was one of the worst days of teaching I have had. Let's just say that I had an emotional breakdown in my boss's office and then had to go face fifty-four students with those puffy I've obviously been crying eyes. Good times, especially when people continuously ask you if you are okay, which only makes you cry more. Know what I'm talking about? The extreme highs and lows of this career called teaching will never cease to surprise me, even as I finish up my sixth year on the job.

Despite having that kind of day, I am choosing to focus on the positive. This letter was left in my teacher mail box for me to find last week. It is one of the best letters I have ever received from students (two of my favorite students ever, even though I'm not supposed to have favorites). When I read it, I cried tears of appreciation at first, but since these students are so funny and weird (and appreciate my weirdness), the tears were soon replaced with laughter.

My proudest day ever as a teacher.

I could write a thousand words about my journey as a teacher, and how so many moments led to this day.

Each year, I bring my passions into the classroom, addressing topics of social justice, equality, peace, exploring with students what it means to be a global citizen who works to make a difference in the lives of those around us and a positive impact on the world. All of these are heavy themes that tenth graders delve into with impressive maturity. But never before have I encountered a group of students who have taken up my passions with me beyond the school year until this group called the Peace Leadership League. 

This was our first year as a group, although most of them have been students in my class before. These students made it their dream, passion, and goal to spread peace, and so they planned our first ever High Tech High Chula Vista Peace Conference. Following hours upon hours of hard work after school and even over spring break and on weekends, the conference took place this past Saturday. Thinking about it still brings tears to my eyes.

The Peace Leadership League.

The conference began with our keynote speaker, Antolin Rodriguez, who leads laughter yoga as an avenue to inner peace. We laughed... a lot.

 We cheered and got really excited.

He connected laughter to inner peace and we stood in a circle and sang "Imagine" by John Lennon.

 Small group discussions.

 The first workshop: Inner Peace.

 The second workshop: Peace on our Campus.

 Reading stories of kids who have been bullied throughout the United States.

 Ribbons to represent the commitment to stand up against bullying.

 The third workshop: Global Peace.

An activity to represent how women throughout the world need to be empowered more and given a voice.

 Writing letters to women in India. 

Final wrap up: students write their peace pledges.

 Students scatter seeds for peace, to represent the potential for peace to grow out of small actions.

 To represent their commitment to peace, students place their handprint with others.

After everyone left, it was just the Peace Leadership League, those students who planned out the entire day, and we celebrated.

I have never felt prouder as a teacher, and I tried to tell the students that as we sat in a circle debriefing, but all I could do was cry. 

And many of the students cried too, because they felt so proud and empowered. Tears still come to my eyes as I write this now, thinking back to some of the words that were shared by students: "I've never felt prouder of myself." "I'm already dreaming of what we can do next year."

Really friends, there is so much hope for the world.

This week in teaching.

We are currently in the midst of the craziest, most insomnia-inducing, stressful, rewarding week of the school year. Tomorrow is our biggest night of the year with our school wide exhibition. My team of 54 students has been working on a project for the past two months called "The Walls that Surround Us." Our students studied international walls/borders, did a case study on the local U.S./Mexico wall/border, and then explored the invisible walls that divide people in our community and society. They wrote memoirs on their invisible walls, and then artistically expressed their ideas on a piece of a wall we built, which we are knocking down as a symbol of our commitment to actively work to break down the walls that divide us.

Tomorrow night, we are exhibiting all of our work, and we will be having four wall breaking ceremonies, where people will read their pledges and excerpts from their memoirs. Here is a small piece of our exhibition, a documentary that was created on invisible walls. If you want to smile a bit, see some reflective high school students, and gain a little hope for the world, I encourage you to take a few minutes to watch it. It's been a week of extreme highs and lows, and this is one of the high points:

(Note: The quality of the video for our exhibition is a lot better, but I had to reduce the size to upload it here.)

A photo essay on the border.

(My partner teacher and I are doing a project with our students called The Walls that Surround Us. We are looking at international borders/ walls, doing a case study on the local US/ Mexico border/ wall, and finally, looking at invisible walls that divide people in our society. As a part of our case study, we took a field trip to the US/ Mexico border.)

As our big yellow school bus approached the border, it was cold and misty, with clouds encroaching in upon us. The border left us feeling the same way as the weather- both had an ominous presence as we exited the bus and waited.

Our tour guide is an activist who works to build cross-border connections, hoping that people on each side of the border will see common humanity in one another. He began to point out that there were two walls and a fence dividing the United States from Mexico; the federal government has been putting a lot of money into building up the border in the past ten years. He spoke of how the increase in the amount of money spent on border enforcement correlates to an increase in deaths of people trying to cross the border. As he was telling us this, Border Patrol drove up to meet us. They let us touch the wall and peer through it. All we could see through the fence was another wall. 

Our next stop was Smuggler’s Gulch, which was given its name during the Prohibition Era, due to the alcohol that was smuggled into the U.S. on this road.

There was growth and beauty at the border, despite it's seemingly destitute ambiance.

Like this picture shows, many people just want paz (peace) at the border instead of separation and death.

The grand finale was Friendship Park, which was established in 1971. It has been a place where people from the United States and Mexico could reunite even though they there was a fence separating them. They could speak through the fence, eat a picnic together, or even embrace each other. Since the second wall has been built in the last couple years, creating a gap that makes it impossible to see let alone communicate with people on the other side of the fence, the park seems less friendly.

The walk to get there was a couple miles along an ecological preserve and the ocean. As we approached Friendship Park, Border Patrol stopped us, telling us that we wouldn’t be able to go into the park, despite our tour guide having spoken to Border Patrol and California State Parks ahead of time. We stood at the bottom of the hill looking up to where we were supposed to be, waiting for permission to walk about 100 more feet. 

We could see that construction was going on; they were working on rebuilding the stretch of fence that went into the ocean. It was the third time in the past ten years they have had to rebuild that part. Not surprisingly, sand isn’t conducive to building border fences. 

Finally after thirty minutes, they let us walk the extra 100 feet and we found ourselves in Friendship Park, looking through two walls to see people on the Mexican side of the border. We waved to each other from afar. The air was heavy, as was my heart. I contemplated how the only thing that really separates me from many people on the other side is the location we were born- one of us in a place with more economic opportunity and the other with less. As a symbol of this division there were two walls dividing us, making it impossible to interact or even make out the faces of those on the other side. 

Earlier in the week, before our field trip, Enrique Morones, who started an organization called Border Angels, came to speak to us. He told us that since 1994, when Operation Gatekeeper was passed and more federal money went into building walls, approximately 10,000 people died trying to cross the border. Some people consider this a human rights issue in our own backyard. Many people immigrate due to economic desperation or to reunite with their families. His organization's goal is to reduce the number of deaths at the border.

As he spoke to my students, he told the story of how he saved two men who were walking through the desert. One of the men had been living in Los Angeles for years, but had to go back to Mexico to bury his mother. He was now on his way back to L.A. to reunite with his family. The grieving man was carrying another man, suffering from dehydration, on his back. Enrique gave them water, and ultimately, saved their lives that day. Enrique works hard to make change in this issue, organizing marches and even meeting with President Obama to encourage him to pass comprehensive immigration reform. He said that people often ask him if he thinks he is actually making a difference, and he always goes back to the story of those two men. As he told my class, though it may seem difficult to make large-scale change, he knows that, on that day, he made a difference to those two men. In fact, the men told him so when they called him two weeks later to say thank you. Enrique went on to tell my class how it is possible to make a small difference that can have a wider-reaching impact, and I hope that in my own small way, I am making an impact by encouraging my students to seek social justice with learning experiences like these.