CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS
It's soup weather. The sky is gray and there is this eerie silence on the streets. It's been raining on and off all morning. The sound of rain always makes me feel as if nothing could be better than curling up at home in bed with a book. Everyone is having a lazy sunday afternoon. So am I. I cleaned my house today. It was about time. I am a slob. But I washed almost everything ( including the toilet), swept, did a little laundry and now I am dwindling away my hour at the internet when I should be lesson planning.
I went out last night with some of my students. We went for drinks ( just juice drinks). They are 17 and yet I feel as if we are the same age, which is dangerous. They talked A LOT about Chad. I feel as if I know him better than I know myself. He is my Romanian soul mate. He, was the former volunteer, if you didn't know by now. "With Chad we did this." "With Chad we did that!" Blah, blah, blah. I am a little sick of Chad, if you couldn't tell. I am glad that they had a good experience with him. I wouldn't want it any other way, but it's hard to be yourself when you are living in somebody else's shadow. He did a lot of theatre things with the kids, and though I want to continue the drama club, I also want to do other things with them. Speaking of which, I am starting the Drama club this week. We are going to have our first organizational meeting on Thursday and then auditions will be the following friday. I am so nervous about writing a play. That is all the kids talk about and they seem to think that I have all the answers; that I am going to write the play. I don't want to disappoint them. But I have decided that I want to create a haunted house in the school for Halloween. I love Halloween.
Oh, I almost forgot, I was on TV again yesterday. Katherine, Steph and I were interviewed live on the local cable channel ( I thought of you Becky). It was a long interview, lasting almost a full hour. Though, I personally don't think we were particularly interesting, I will try to get a copy and send it home. We were interviewed in Romanian with a translator. I think he ended up talking the most out of all of us. The big question was about...you can probably guess...Sept. 11th. It was inevitable.
So, this week I think I will continue teaching Human Rights with my 11th graders. I know they hate it but they need it. No more outrageous stories of Bogdan and his swastica necklace. I asked some of the other kids what the deal was with that and they said he was just trying to be different and attrack attention. I already knew that much. I talked with the kids about being Jewish and they said some of the most incredible, totally predictable things; "Jews have lots of money," "they are good at business." I even got one "They are shifty," whatever that means. They just don't know. Most of them have never met anyone different then themselves. I mean you are different if you have blonde hair. So, I will keep pushing human rights, like a drug. Maybe with luck something small will seep through. What I will do with my ninth and tenth graders remains to be seen.
Okay folks, I better get going back out to the cold!! I love the cold!!!