Creating Capital

[I won't lie-- I had to look up the difference between capital with an a or with an o. Oh grammar, I just can't quit you!]

Lately, I've been trying some alternatives to traditional career moves and I came across a website my friend Redd from college has been actually making a LIVING off of. I have been so proud of her because she's one of the most creative and industrious people I've ever met. A couple of highlights about her...she moved from the UK for college in the US (so brave!), has supported herself working in a career of her dreams (stage management) in Atlanta, then took a huge leap and moved to Las Vegas and worked for Cirque du Soleil! How cool is that? She has written an excellent, relatable food blog that she also published as an e-book cookbook. Now, she's been doing voice over work for a long time and has made her career off of this site called fiverr. Her voice is beautiful and she's technically minded, so she can edit and market herself quite brilliantly. She's my "living her dream" hero! 

A few months ago, I started my own fiverr. I'm sticking with stuff I know-- letter and card writing, water-color painting, and homemade natural living products. I'd like to add some editing and other digital services, but for now, that's what's on my plate.

So, if you're interested, please take a look! Feel free to share far and wide, because I'd sure appreciate it.
Remember my post about making natural deodorant? You can buy your very own container of it-- customized with essential oils of your choice. Click HERE for deodorant.

Want to relax and take a break? I've read recently about the effects of magnesium deficiency in our diets from the environment being stripped of certain minerals. Did you know a nightly (or weekly, comeon, ain't-nobody-got-time-for-that) bath in epsom salts can help restore your magnesium levels naturally and safely? Check out my customized bath satchets HERE.

My fiverr gigs also include hand painted water-color cards (or could be on a small, frame-able paper) HERE, post cards from Colorado HERE, and hand written, locally printed (Leanin' Tree Art in Boulder, Colorado) cards HERE. If you know me in real life, you know I send cards and postcards like nobody's business already. ;)

If you're interested in something along those lines from me...please send me a message! I am pretty shamelessly plugging myself here, but maybe you'd be interested in this cool world of five-bucks-a-pop.

Payment note: fiverr.com uses paypal. For some people, that's very easy. For others, it's a new financial system. Until recently (thanks, Trina!) I was not a paypal user. It's safe and easy...and I'm still scared of bitcoin.

Feminism Friday! The Idyllic Land of Norovirus

I wanted to write a status update (a la my friend Joan who writes small missives about her day) in the moment about this little experience, but then it seemed like I had too many things rolling around in my head. (I love Joan's status updates. It reminds me the good things that can happen in rough schools with the right person wearing her heart on her sleeve!)

We have a wreath because adults have wreaths. 

Lately I've been taking a step back, career-wise, and re-evaluating what I'm doing with my life. I worked really hard and nearly non-stop in my twenties and had a lot of stressful years. I have a lot of things I'm proud of-- a Master's Degree, many travels, much writing. Lots of stories from times spent with friends, romance and breakups, and laughter and tears. I said goodbye to my grandmothers in my twenties and I hold them very close in my heart-- their words sometimes echo in mine and I smile to think of all the skills and loves I share with them. Crock-pot cooking with whatever is in the house? Grandma Jane. Flower arranging (ah, dried eucalyptus smells so good!) and wreath making? Grandma Marilyn. I pulled out my watercolor painting supplies and have been working on those-- a skill I practiced while in one grandma's native Italy, the other's love of travelling firmly instilled in me.

The days of working 12 hours and feeling like nothing I do matters, even though I'm pouring my heart into every minute of planning, teaching, listening to, working with, assisting...lessons with children? That's on pause. And man, it feels GREAT. Teaching is rewarding, but it's become a field synonymous with levels of exhaustion akin to having triplet newborns. You love what you're doing, but as soon as one mess of poo gets cleaned up, there's another one waiting.  So a gap year of sorts was in order for me.

I've been nannying and babysitting for families in the suburbs of Denver. I love it. [Any names I use for children have been changed for their privacy. Any pics have their identity obscured because I think kids should be protected from the evils of the interwebz before they're in high school!]

Crockpot stew like Grandma Jane's

The town where I have been working is a very special place. There's a manner of frozen in time going on with these kids' childhoods! Kids walk, bike, and razor-scooter to school. They ride their bikes and take the local bus to the ice cream shop and have milkshakes before heading to the library, skateboard park, or nature trail. They play musical instruments and soccer...and the parents are in the stands or audience, cheering for their babies. In a word, it's idyllic.

After working in inner-city and OTP Atlanta for 10 years, I was left with the sinking feeling that childhood was a myth. Kids had to deal with food stamps and immigration (and they still do), and were generally learning skills (manipulation and lying) to serve them in a life that I wouldn't be proud, personally, to live. They were learning that school was about test scores and nothing more. It is incredibly disheartening for all parties involved-- parents, kids, teachers, administrators, law enforcement. Where did middle class America go?

I found it! (And I dearly wish it for every kid everywhere.)

The cul-de-sac where I've been finding myself every afternoon, Monday-Friday, has kids with swings, apple trees, scooters, bikes, gardens, friendly Fidos, and sassy cats. There are a group of little boys (ages 5-9) who play outside every day. One was using a magnifying glass (from his chemistry set!) to try to start fires. I shared, "Oh, I used to do that when I was a kid!" and he responded, "My mom said the same. It must be a rite of kid passage." Gulp. Wut? Kids talk like that here.

No Holy Grail outfits, but they looked like this. 

The boys also were playing with one of the oldest toys that any parent knows will entertain kids for hours-- a big ole box. I looked out the porch window and thought, "Oh dear. That child has a battle axe."

Box. Best. Toy. Ever. 

Yup. The neighborhood boys were demolishing a large box with their medieval (plastic) swords and battle axe. Boys will be boys, but it sure looked like fun to me. They jousted, they hacked, they smashed, they pillaged. And when the box was in pieces (and had been converted also to a dinosaur costume), they placed all the pieces in the recycling bin. One of them asked if I could try to bring a box from my house tomorrow. I promised I'd do my best. (Recycling dumpster, don't fail me!)

One of the boys noticed my State Park sticker in the windshield of my car (oh skills of observation, very coveted!). I felt that I'd been transported to a beach in SoCal-- as he put his little hands up (in a stop gesture) and said, "Whoa! Whoa! Do you go to Eldo, like my Dad? He has a sticker like that on his car from Eldo." -- yeah, bro, the hiking and climbing at Eldo are totally choice.-- Not really, I said, "Oh yeah, this is a State Park pass for Colorado. You can go to any of the parks. You've probably been to Golden Gate Canyon and Cherry Creek? But I like Eldorado Canyon too." Totally rad sticker, dude-bro.

Just painting this picture of the nature of these kids. They play outdoors. They eat actual food (one of the kiddos had a playdate, in which she searched the fridge for cherry tomatoes she'd picked from the garden (because "they'll go perfectly with our snack!") to go with the berries, cheese, and pretzels. They make their beds. They have TV time limits. They are adorable.

So why did I call this post Feminism Friday? Well, one of the kiddos (who's a girl) was having a playdate with two other friends. They carefully sat down at the table and completed their math  homework and quizzed each other over their analogies. I interrupted only to remind them at you have to say all the words that the colons stand for in analogies, or they don't really make sense. "Ship is to sailor, not ship dot dot sailor, as the colon suggests." These kids are that driven and sweet. There was no inkling that "math was hard because we're girls" and that's refreshing.

There's tons of statistics  (like college enrollment rates) and research that support that women are still underrepresented in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. Women of color (more specifically Black and Latino) are terribly underrepresented, with this fear of science stemming (sorry) from elementary school years. Motivation, gender, and color are huge when it comes to which people will finish school with which degrees. Particularly, Latino girls see themselves as caretakers of others, and will, if they choose to seek a career, mention ones that relate to taking care of children and babies (teacher, day care worker, nurse), more than any other field. It's incredibly limiting and sad as a society to see this play out. The truth is, we need a society with women AND men scientists and doctors. Women and men bring different roles to the proverbial table, which makes better workplaces for us all.

(Quick side note: I just read The Green Glass Sea, which is a children's book that received the Scott O'Dell award for Historical fiction. It was GREAT. It dealt with a girl protagonist living on the base of Los Alamos when they were building the atomic bombs. The kids meet all the scientists you think about learning the early stages of radiation studies. It's a different side of WWII book than I'd read. If you have kids-- 8-12ish, make them read it.)

Imagine my surprise when the girls trotted upstairs to gather (it seemed like) every stuffed animal and

baby doll known to man to bring to the basement to "play daycare." I was a little disheartened-- these are girls who have scientist and engineer parents-- why are they stuck in this gender-role play?

I gave it some time, and laughed as I came downstairs to check on them. The babies were all in the side room-- in quarantine. They were using makeshift cell phones -- calculators, old phones-- to call all the parents at the day care. They'd come, not as day care workers, but as CDC doctors to quarantine the Norovirus. Yes. The Norovirus. One kiddo warned me, "Don't go in there. It's the Norovirus.  There's vomit. EVERYWHERE! We have to keep these kids on lock!" They giggled and laughed as they put on their imaginary medical gear to take care of the babies and to put on press conferences about spreading the virus. They put on serious voices and made day care outgoing messages for the parents of the children struck.

With the Ebola virus crippling Africa currently and scaremongering laypeople about hospital care of those aid workers returning home, (even in my native Atlanta and alma mater Emory) it seemed prescient that these kids were playing doctor/scientist/aid worker in the basement in Colorado. They are neatly living this beautiful idyllic childhood, but the real world exists.

And this highly-contagious world may have a few health care workers coming up through the ranks in a few years!!

Nervous Nellie on Exam Day...and I'm the Teacher!

I meant to post this last week, but things have been pretty hectic in high school teaching land. The week and days leading up to the AP exam were pretty intense. There were a lot of senior activities that split the kids’ attention—and made it hard for them to focus on (what I think is important…) their AP Literature exam. 

Realistically, is my class the only one they have? Nope, they have 6 others…presumably 3 other core classes and 3 electives—which take varying degrees of time. 

Is my class *that* important? Nope. Family, extracurriculars, volunteering, working, music, sports, social life…I find these things imperatives to a healthy, well-rounded upbringing.

But wait, they signed up to take AP and I signed on to teach AP so that they could have a shot at getting a 3, 4, or 5 on the AP exam (and subsequently exempt a college class) and to be challenged in an academically rigorous and collegiate environment for the year. The exam is the culmination of their efforts.

All the books. (I assigned one a month since December. That was painful.) All the essays. All the Socratic Seminars. All the debates. All the Literature Circles. All the movie tie-ins. All the vocabulary quizzes. All the crazy rants I went off on about critical theory. All the technological assignments that had strict deadlines.  Tons of this was new to them. High school hasn’t been hard for a lot of the kids because they’re smart or the classes are easy. My class has been a big change for them. I’m okay with the fact that I challenged them.

 *      *      *      *

The Friday before the exam, a huge amount of the kids were on the senior trip to Disney. [I was more or less assigned to babysit a couple other classes due to  the lack of substitutes in the building. No big deal—I sent the extra kids into my classroom with a Disney movie on (well, it was Pirates of the Caribbean) and made a round-table arrangement of desks in the hallway. (Sort of the hallway—I have a little mini-entrance that I call the Vocabulary Vestibule because I hang up their comic versions of SAT words out here.)] Any of my AP students were to check in with their electives and then come back to work on AP. We worked on poetry, multiple choice, and applying literary vocabulary. It was groups of 2 to a dozen kids plus me—on a lot of coffee. (I talked re-heeaaaalllllly fast.)

We milked every practice discussion question for what it was worth and we debated the best ways to approach the essays. Kids who had felt nervous about their abilities got praise from their peers (and me) and hopefully took some of the weight of their self-doubt off of their shoulders. We argued about the reasoning for studying old, ancient, dusty poems and the relevance-slash-confusion of modern, new ones. We brainstormed the books we’ve read (mostly from this school year)—Invisible Man, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein, The Bean Trees, Robinson Crusoe, The Bluest Eye, Great Gatsby, Night, Julius Caesar, A Doll’s House, The Awakening, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Joy Luck Club…They realized that they have more stuffed in their brains than they think. 

I wished I had a small, laser-like focused AP group every dang day. It was very awesome.

Leading up, every day after school, I worked with kids on whatever they wanted help on. We had a movie afternoon and compared “Children of Men” to 1984. We watched parts of 1984 and scoffed at the movie-making techniques of only a handful of years ago. We watched parts of Wall-E and discussed how this had shades of Bradbury and Orwell. 

College Liberal-arts background: you’ve served me well. 

So, May 9^th was the exam and I went and met the kids in the library before they headed off. It was “Decade Day,” so many of them were in ridiculous outfits and costumes—notably many 1950-60’s Doris-Day looking fancy dresses and heels that, according to the kids, were inspired by The Help. I was in a hippie skirt, along with many of my Flower-Children! They weren’t to take anything with them, so I offered to hold onto cell phones—

I think a picture is worth more than a description here. 

Here’s the strange part to me—I had a large number of kids taking the exam—between 70 and 80. I’ve had plenty of kids taking high-stakes exams—Graduation tests, EOCT’s, 3^rd, 5^th, and 11^th grade Writing Test. I’ve never *felt* anything like this.

I was nervous. 

The whole morning (3+ hours!) I was pacing and just a wreck! I had the butterflies in my stomach and a dry throat—I was just so dang nervous for my babies. I can’t imagine having children and watching them perform on a stage. That must be torture. 

When they started trickling in to collect their (eh-hem) expensive electronic devices, I felt the weight lifting off of my shoulders. For better or for worse, they’d taken their exam. Most of them felt confident about the multiple choice (“You gave us way harder questions than ones that were on there, Miss G.!”), the poetry essay (“I just annotated it, TPCASTT’d it, and wrote everything I could think of!”) and the Free-response essay (“Is it okay that it seemed JUST like the essay I wrote for you about ---- book? The prompt seemed familiar!”). The prose essay was something modern and they didn’t enjoy it, but oh well. Some of them didn’t space their time well and ran out. Oh well. Some of them came in beaming and pleased with themselves…and that’s what makes me happy.

So I made it through a year of teaching AP Literature. Check one more curriculum off the list for me. The kids learned a bunch of stuff. Their writing improved vastly and I greatly desensitized them to their allergy to reading. I’d say it’s been a good year.