I hope that everyone else is having a good summer! I'm kind of in a limbo state this week––I had teacher orientation last week for my summer job teaching at the East Harlem School in NYC, and we don't start teaching until next week, so I'm just at home right now planning lessons. I've got two sections of 6th grade Humanities and a Government elective that I'm co-teaching with a student from Brown. The Humanities curriculum is pretty rigid in terms of what we have to teach: the theme for this summer session is courage, and each grade reads a different book (the 6th graders are reading Hatchet); so we have to keep to a strict schedule of reading to finish the books in the 5 weeks of the session as we also teach grammar and vocabulary. The Government elective, on the other hand, is completely open––we get to design the curriculum ourselves, which is really cool because we get to teach what we're interested in. The school is a private school mostly for low-income students in the neighborhood, although other low-income students from other areas of the city go there as well. The summer session is mandatory for all the students to prevent summer learning loss, and they have college and older high school students teach. It's a really interesting place.
Other than that, I'm mostly just reading all the stuff I didn't have time to read during the school year. I just reread the last two Harry Potter books, partially out of nostalgia and partially because I just saw a trailer for the 6th movie and decided I wanted to reread them. You can tell how nerdy I am because as I was reading the 7th book, one of my thoughts was, "There's a lot of stuff here that's similar to Lord of the Rings; that would be a cool paper to get to write, comparing Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings." I know, sad, isn't it? I'm reading Harry Potter and I'm contemplating a paper I could write on it! That plus the fact that now I'm starting to try to read Ulysses (we'll see how that goes...) has pretty much cemented my status as an über-nerd. Hmm... what school do I go to again?
I've also been glued to the television, watching what's going on with the protests over the election in Iran and the debate over health care. The latter's frustrating me immensely while the former has me spellbound. I feel like the situation in Iran is one of those events that could turn out to be a great historical turning point, another Tiananmen Square-like event in terms of its imprint on the world's collective memory. It's really thrilling to live through it, and I hope the reformers have the courage and strength to keep standing up for their own freedom to choose their leaders.
What's everyone else up to? Keep posting, people!
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