Bullet Point Post: The Fourth Grade Edition

• I’m required to journal every week, as a part of my student teaching requirements, and I’ve come to relish the weekly opportunity to process through the things I’ve seen, experienced, and learned.

• I also secretly dream of all those pages of reflections and classroom stories becoming a part of a book someday. Although I imagine there’s a wide range of experiences and wisdom I need to gain before anything I happen to type could be considered “book material.”

• I’ve been student teaching for seven weeks thus far, and the experience of teaching, of being in the classroom, has yet to lose its charm. I remain completely captivated by each of the 18 hearts in the class, and not a day goes by that I do not look forward to seeing them, and to what the school day might hold for us.

• I’ve been the sole teacher in the classroom this week, responsible for every element of the day, and have thoroughly enjoyed the odd sense of both increased freedom and greatly heightened responsibility. Of course, the wonderful woman whose classroom I have taken over is just a few doors away, and I treasure my conversations with her at the end of the day.

• Math class today featured a test for which we have painstakingly prepared, as we slogged through hours of long division over the past four weeks. As to the results, I’ll say that I am pleased with our mastery of the subject in the good moments, and reminding myself that the grades of my students do not directly correlate to my value as a person in the slightly less stellar moments.

• I really am proud of my little mathematicians, though.

• I’m on lunch duty this week, which entails the highly sought-after thrill of lunching with 50 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, and also affords me an invaluable view into the lives and minds of the kids with whom I spend my days. I alternate between the 4th grade boys’ and girls’ tables (the natural- if occasionally awkward- gender mixing begins to occur in 5th grade), and the difference in mealtime conversation is literally night and day between the two tables. On Tuesday, I heard about play dates and fights with sisters, and about the time Lala’s mom made these really, really great tacos. On Wednesday, I heard about last night’s episode of Flash, discussed my favorite Star Wars movies, in order, and watched in awe as seven Red Velvet Oreos become one mega-Oreo.

• I’ll let you guess which meal was spent at which table.

• After having tasted them for the first time this past summer, I’ve allowed myself to develop a rather specified dependence on Combos. Specifically, the Buffalo Bleu Cheese flavor of Combos. More specifically yet, Buffalo Bleu Cheese Combos that are slightly stale and 100% frozen after sitting in my glove compartment for an undetermined amount of days prior. I really go for those.

• Although, I’ve not had any this week, and am wondering if I should carry my accidental abstinence further, into a kind of self-imposed, cold-turkey intervention.

• But I probably won’t because, well, I like them.

• Every Thursday morning, my kids turn in their Words and Sentences. Which are, as you might imagine, a list of their weekly spelling words and sentences written using said words. One sweet girl- the same angel who spent an entire week of recess attached to my side as I made my recess duty rounds, wrote 20 sentences about herself and me. She recounted (imaginary) adventures, stated preferences and distastes, and made jokes, each and every one with a reference to Miss Shull.

• Upon my return to the classroom (I grade Words and Sentences while they have art), I casually mentioned to her that her Words and Sentences made me smile. She beamed.

• I pray for all the kids, but on days like today, I especially pray for that one. And for myself. Because I’m living my life in large part exposed to these 18 pair of intent eyes, and I know they’re smart enough to see through what I do wrong, where I fall short, where I need to grow so much more.

• I pray for their hearts, and for mine. I pray for their futures, for their families, their friendships, their gifts. I pray for wisdom and guidance and a soft heart to hear what He’s saying, and go where He’s directing.

• And I thank God for them. That I do quite a bit.

~Natalia

Question Mark

That’s a big question mark, I hear myself say.

Over and over, it’s a phrase I’ve used before, many times, I’m sure.

But these past two days, it’s caught in my ear, the words sounding deeper, yet more noteworthy, even as they settle to the ground, their sound fading from the air.

I imagine the question mark in my head as I listen to the echo of curious uncertainty in my voice.

In my mind, I see the curved punctuation mark hanging above my life, a bold, yet not unpleasant reminder of my own limits. Below the question mark, I see a scene, a moment, a place. Corners faded, details blurred, the colors are bright, the light cheery, but really, I can’t quite make it all out.

That’s true for many areas of my life, especially this year, I think.

I’ve told you a little bit, maybe, about finishing my time living and studying downtown.

Have I told you about moving to the northern suburbs, just miles south of Wisconsin, for student teaching?

Have I told you that I’m leaving on Sunday, and begin my 15-week student teaching experience on Monday?

Have I told you I’m excited?

Have I told you how much I know, what I expect, what I imagine I’ll do?

And have I told you all the things, the many, many things, that I just don’t know?

The things that really, are just a question mark?

Like the students in the class- fourth grade?

Like shopping and eating and sleeping and life in my new (temporary) home?

Like church and weekends home and a relationship stretching much farther than before?

And just about every other detail, every other moment, every other story and soul and person that I know make life the complicated, intricate, wonderful knot that it is.

It’s all a question mark. For me.

But it’s not for Him, not at all.

And I think that might be why I’m not worried, not stressed, not scared.

Why the images I see- those faint scenes below my rising question mark- glow so cheerily.

Because when a Master Painter, really the Lord of all, draws the lines, colors the fields of my next day and my next week and every adventure after that,

it’s a question mark to me,

but it’s not to Him,

and really, that makes it seem rather more like an exclamation point,

doesn’t it?

~Natalia

Just Here Remembering

I’ve been here for awhile. Sitting on my bed, the lumpy purple throw pillow behind me becoming progressively flatter as I sink deeper into the school-issued mattress. I wonder, as I watch the cursor blink in the empty cavern of the WordPress box, what I will miss about this school when I leave. I sit, breathing the residence hall scent of clean laundry, ramen, and twenty-four different brands of perfume, and feel my mind wander, tracing the threads of routines, classes, and friendships through the past three and a half years.

Gazing with unfocused eyes out the window at the towering buildings across the street, their black windows outlined against the orange-gray background of light pollution, I follow the path my heart and mind trace. I think about the minutes between classes, the rhythmic clock ticks between the 50 and the hour. I think about the conversations I had even this morning between classes; words exchanged with friends as I shrugged my bookbag onto my shoulders, head-jerking my ponytail from its perpetual entrapment under the bag’s thick straps. I think about the settled feeling of familiarity that there is even in those moments between classes. Every week, every day, every hour. Finish the class, pack up the bag, take those steps through the door, down the hall. Moving from learning to learning between friends, beside friends, behind friends.

I think about the lunch routine. Moody’s dining room has a Twitter account- 2000 followers who check in every morning, noon, and night to see what delicacy they’ll be serving us next. Sitting in Romans on Monday, I pull my phone from the bookbag propped haphazardly under my seat, swipe through internet tabs to the food service page. Popcorn chicken and Mac n Cheese! Chicken noodle soup! Tortilla pie! I read to Sara, sitting next to me, her own bookbag drooping rather pathetically against my chair. And in those moments before class begins, the professor at the front of the class looks up from his powerpoint preparation, eyebrows raised, mouth furrowed quizzically, uncertainly. Are you ordering a meal? And I laugh and shake my head, waving my phone in explanation. And he nods, chuckling, as the clock ticks to 11am: the beginning of class.

I think about slipping quite obtrusively into a meeting just this evening. Twenty underclassmen of my own major gathered under the tutelage of the woman whose influence is seeping into every aspect of the education program here at Moody. I’ve interrupted, I know, and I’m about to wait in the hallway once more, but before I can tell her so, she’s there next to me, arm around me, both of us standing between forty eyes and the door I’ve just closed behind me. She introduces me and I feel my cheeks, my neck prickle with the heat of recognition, even as my heart swells with her kind words. I nod, smile, thank her, then slip back into the hallway to wait.

And not twenty minutes later, I’m back in the room, now empty of its underclassmen visitors. And even as she nods in approval of the project I’ve asked her input on, I feel again the shift, an ever-so-slight change in the winds of my footing, my place, my role. She packs her bag and I swing mine back over my shoulder and when the elevator’s dumped us onto the ground floor, we’re engrossed in an impassioned conversation on teaching, curriculum development, and books she knows I’d love, books we both can’t wait to read. And outside in the cold, she steps to the street and I move towards the dorms, my arms wrapped around themselves against the cold, and my parting words declare that I’ll come back to Moody- I’ll work to improve this major, teaching the things we both know need taught.

And we laugh, of course, because it was mostly a joke. But there’s a part that’s serious, a part of me that is passionate about this school and the students and the learning that fill its walls. And I guess, in the end, there are hundreds of things I’ll miss about being here, come December when I roll away, but who knows, who’s really the one to tell, if I won’t yet return to this downtown college?

Of course, God knows, God will say. But that’ll be in His time, in His way. And for now, I’m just here remembering.

~Natalia

This Gift

I wrote a cover letter last night. A fake one, a mock one, for a pre-graduation, prep-you-for-the-real-world class.

I chose a school (actually where I’ll be student teaching next semester), created a heading, found a cover letter model online to follow, and I began to write.

By the time I finished the brief letter, typing my name professionally at the bottom, I has convinced myself that I was made for a job at that school.

Of course, only God knows (literally) where He’ll take me after graduation, but I found the ease with which I wrote about the school rather comforting; maybe I can do professional things like write cover letters and apply for jobs, after all.

I convinced myself to hire me, but more than that, as I wrote those short paragraphs, I was able to articulate something that’s been sitting in my heart, looming in my head for some time.

The gift that Moody Bible Institute is.

Maybe I’ve known it all along, but this semester, sitting in classes on Romans, Apologetics, and a myriad of education classes, I’ve become yet more assured, more aware of the blessings I’ve been given.

This school is unique, a biblical, theological, practical education like none other. It took me two tries to get accepted, but to be here is to learn and grow in an environment that few others are blessed to have.

I’m being poured into, nurtured, instructed.

And it’s all so that I might turn right around and pour into someone else.

Bless someone else.

Teach someone else.

To keep what I’ve been given would be to squander it, waste it, misuse it.

So I learn now, and I study hard, and I pour my heart and life into what is before me. Because soon, the cover letter will be real, and the application will be accepted, and the job will begin, and then it’ll be my turn to pour and nurture, teach and disciple, and I want to be ready.

~ Natalia

Back and Coming Again

Elementary Education and Bible Secondary Education class of 2015. Photo taken in Hampshire, Illinois, where, unlike the city, the leaves change color in the fall, and it is gorgeous.

Snapped a selfie in the choir room in the moments before our walks down the aisle.

It’s been a handful of days since I was here, I know.

Moody’s Missions Conference began last Tuesday night, kicking off with an evening of multi-cultural and multi-lingual preaching and worship. The night ended with a praise-dance-party, to the soundtrack of cheering, and the organized chaos of hundreds of students moving, worshipping, celebrating.

Wednesday meant saying goodbye to my last Missions Conference as an undergrad student and joining my fellow future teachers for a two-day education conference in the far suburbs. We dressed as teachers, relished time spent together, and learned from teachers, leaders, and professionals whose careers are years beyond our own, and whose wisdom we note on scrap paper, in notebooks, store away in mental notes and memories.

Friday brought a wedding on the horizon, as Kat prepared to so “I Do
with Fred. There was rehearsal, dinner, preparations, conversations, planning, organizing, decorating, and a heavy dose of conversation and catching up with old friends in between.

Saturday, wedding day, brought all the excitement and action you might imagine, and a wonderful reception to boot.

And now it’s Sunday night, nearly 1am, and I’m nodding, fighting sleep, even as I write.

So I will leave for now, but I’m back and I’m here and you’ll hear from me in the coming days, I bet.

~Natalia

Library Slip Legacy

There’s a children’s section here at the library.

On the first floor, behind the newspaper racks, the Chicago Sun Times draped haphazardly over the wooden bars.

There are novels there; young adult fiction lined side by side, Newberry Honor stickers stuck sideways on their spines.

There are picture books, too; shelves reaching near the ceiling, their thin spines flaunting chirpy titles and taglines.

I’ve spun through the library turnstile many time in these past weeks and months.

Stepped around the corner, pulled picture pages, novels off the shelves, flipped through them.

I’ve borrowed some of them, tucked under my arm, shoved into my book bag between battered notebook and folders of notes.

There are books everywhere in my room; stacked on the desk, lined on the book shelf, pushed in piled next to the dresser.

Sitting on my bed, I open one of the library book, flip through the pages. A library return slip, not mine, but faded and flimsy from years of preservation between the book’s pages, falls onto my lap.

I pick up the paper, read the faded printing on the top of the page.

I recognize the name. A former elementary education student, her last year at Moody coincided with my first.

This same name has fallen from my library books before; library return slips memorializing a former student whose learning interests have proven to be a foreshadowing of my own.

She’s left a legacy of learning, and there’s a strange comfort in knowing that outside of these Moody walls, there is a young teacher who read the same books that I’ve pulled from the shelf, who learned under the same professors whose tests I’ve crammed for, who struggled and learned and taught and worked.

And now I’m here, studying and learning, being challenged and growing, and sometimes I wonder, as I find another of her faded library slips under my bed, if I’m leaving a legacy at this school, too.

~Natalia

March 1st: Part Three

This is the last part of those wonderful hours spent playing and learning at our professor’s home. Here’s Part One, and also Part Two, just in case.

The prison.
Last game, it’s 2:30pm when we begin. We’ll play until 4pm, he says, and I cannot imagine this dice-rolling, piece-moving, card-drawing stretching until then. But it does. We’re the prisoners to his German officers, our multi-colored pieces hopping across the board. Around the table, five players watch the board intently, searching its jail-patterned backdrop for the answers to our puzzle, for our escape. Standing, I lean over the board, study the spaces, the rooms, the walls. I count the spaces between my pieces, the spaces to my goals. I strategize a way, get arrested, replan, rethink, redo. The child toddles past, bare feet smacking faintly on the hardwood floor. I pick her up, her weight on my hip familiar, comfortable. She sips her milk bottle, I plan my escape from a German Prisoner of War camp.

The clock ticks by. It’s 3:30pm. Slowly, we begin to understand the community aspect of the game. In order to win, you must get two of your own pieces safely out of jail, he’d said. But I’ll be beaten when any two pieces escape. Slowly, we understand. It’s not a me versus them; it’s an us versus him. We work together, then. Pass cards back and forth: do you need this? Will this help you? Time is running out and we’re desperate now. Desperate to work together. She’s stuck, needs rope. I hand over mine and with it, the escape plan I had labored over. We yell, cheer, when another break free. I dance, nervous, the child still on my hip, as I watch her roll the dice.
She must survive, we can do this.

The game ends at 4:02pm. I’ve lost, my pieces forfeited in a Do or Die move that would free me or kill me. But it doesn’t feel like a loss at all. Doesn’t feel like disappointment, the slump of shoulders, the shrug of indifference to cover the sting of effort lost. Doesn’t feel like that because it’s not that. This is success. This game is cooperation, community. This game is awareness of others, watching the colored pieces move; where is she going, how can I help her, what is best for another. This game is teamwork, self sacrifice. This game has rules, but so does life and maybe they’re more like guidelines. This game is planning and then scrapping your plan with one misstep, one roll of the dice, one endangered friend. This game is improvisation and heart and struggle and learning, growing constantly.

This game is you are not your own, you are not alone. And those are lessons that everyone can learn.

And tomorrow, I drive once more along the highway towards this wonderful home on the corner. But I’ll not go all the way there. Rather, there’s a school beside the highway, brick building full of learning and teaching and students and Jesus. And tomorrow, I’ll visit and I’ll meet and I’ll ask questions and I’ll hear more, and maybe in January, I’ll go back and teach.

~Natalia

March 1st: Part Two

In case you missed it, you can find Part One of this school report turned blog post here.

The States.
Explaining the game, the Professor pauses, searching for a word. He’s making a comparison, an analogy, to clarify this game, a card game of the United States. He alludes to an alternate title, one he’ll not say. It’s like Cheat, he says, after a moment. I nod, then, understanding. My mother doesn’t like that game’s title either.

But this is a different game, one of geography and maps and sometimes a little guessing, and maybe a little improvising, hoping the others don’t catch on, aren’t paying attention. The baby having slid off my lap, off to play, and we’re four again around the card table, taking turns laying down states, oceans, even one card reading CANADA across the top.

Fourth grade, maybe fifth, I knew these states well. Trading roles, I was the teacher, my mother was the student. Map of the United States printed blank, state outlines unlabeled, I tested her. She wrote the state names, their capitals. She wrote, I corrected. Red pencil borrowed from my professor-father’s desk, I marked the maps, corrected them, learned them. Now it’s twelve years later and my eyes are closed, I’m scrambling to see that map in my mind. Does Georgia touch South Carolina? Does it touch the Gulf of Mexico? How many states does Utah border? I learned in fourth grade, sitting cross legged at the dining table, red pencil in hand. And I’m learning now; a mix and match, guess and check kind of learning. Trying hard to remember what I used to know.

Tea and cookies.
He appears in the doorway as we play, brandishing a white tea pot in the air like some medieval banner: Under this hot beverage, I will conquer! But he’s talking about the traditional way of making tea, waving his free hand towards the table behind us, under the window. Outside, the snow is cold and white, lining the windowsill, covering the yard, falling now in fresh, fat flakes. Inside, there are cups and matching saucers, a plate of cookies, still warm. He tells us about tea leaves and milk in first and sugar to taste, and we watch the dark tea swirl lighter, sip the hot liquid. The United States spread before me still, cards waiting to be matched, played, I sip my tea, dip my cookie in it when no one is looking. Later, sitting on the living room couch, he says cultural experience, and there’s a kind of worth in that. He cares to bake for us, he cares to prepare for us. He cares to share his tea with us.

He cares.

~Natalia

March 1st: Part One

On March 1st, twelve of the girls in the elementary education program spent the day in the home of one of our dear professors. We left school too early on a Saturday, and spent the day playing educational games, eating delicious treats, and enjoying the company of our hosts and one another. It took two hours to drive home through standstill Chicago traffic in a blizzard, but March 1st was one of my favorite days of the semester, and a memory I’m still captivated by. This is Part One of the response paper I submitted after our adventure.

The snow.
The snow is piled on either side of the driveway. Uneven, sloping piles. I pull between them, inch towards the garage door, park. This home, this little town, is not what I expected; the house stands alone on the corner, set apart, yet warmly indifferent to its own separation. There is snow in the city, as well; black, gravel-filled spires of frozen precipitation lining the streets, narrowing the sidewalks. Here, the snow is still white, laying sofly across spacious lawns, draped seamlessly over front yard bushes, trees. Here, the snow is white and the air is still, quiet. The peace is heavy, bright. It’s almost disorienting.

The turkey.
Timeline, the game is called. We sit, four of us, around the card table. The cards are small when they’re dumped out of the metal tin, onto the table; they remind me of Ticket to Ride cards. The rule book- more of a pamphlet, really- falls out of the tin, too, and I pick it up, unfold it. This game is unfamiliar and I want to understand, I want to be able to play. Six cards each, it’s a simple game, although a challenging one. I learned every date in Christianity and Western Culture 1, completely aced Christianity and Western Culture 2, but now there are six world events in front of me, lined askew on the edge of the card table, and I feel my eyes squint as I wrack my brain for the right answer; surely I know the right answer, right?

I’m wrong on my first turn. Hands flat on the table, I split the growing timeline, separate a blank between two events, tentatively flip my own card into the open space. Nope. Wrong. Not even close. I discard that one, draw another. Six cards still in front of me.

We play Timeline twice, and I lose both rounds. The one with the most cards left. Wrong. But this game, this simple plot, these few rules, they’re motivating me. I want to know the answers. I don’t want to know to win now, I want to know because knowledge has value. Knowledge is relevant. The beginning of the 100 Years War, the invention of glass, The first Woodstock; history has stages and eras and wars and riots and inventions, but it’s all one story: the story of the world. I want to know the story. Know it to teach well. Know it to find my place in the legacy of things said, and done, changes made, feats accomplished. Know it because someone, someday, might ask we when the turkey became a thing, and I will give them an answer. The right answer.

The baby.
There’s a picture of her and her brother, pinned to a board outside of an office in an academic building in a big city. There’s a picture, but real life is better. In real life, she’s small, as two year old children often are, her baby-fine hair trimmed in bangs that frame gentle almond eyes. In real life, she sits on my lap as I play Timeline, miniature hands wrapped around the discarded card I’ve given her to hold. In real life, she’s vibrant, active, engaging. In real life, she smells like baby shampoo and fruit juice.

The States.
Explaining the game, the Professor pauses, searching for a word. He’s making a comparison, an analogy, to clarify this game, a card game of the United States. He alludes to an alternate title, one he’ll not say. It’s like Cheat, he says, after a moment. I nod, then, understanding. My mother doesn’t like that game’s title either.

~Natalia

See You Later

Front row, far right. She can’t stay in her seat; can’t or won’t. Doesn’t. Elbows on desk, she leans forward, looping her feet over the back of her blue plastic chair. Completing a worksheet, she stands next to her desk, bouncing gently on her toes, swaying back and forth as if a breeze had somehow sprung up right there in the classroom. Her clip- the one with her number on it- is drawn from the bucket. She’s done her homework, she gets the spinning chair for the day.

She spins, spins, spins. It’s distracting, feels chaotic, but it’s her prize and she eared it, so she spins.

Back row, far left. 8am, the classrooms are open, she’s always the second. First him, on the dot, 8am. Then her, a minute, maybe two, later. She stretches growing legs under her desk, crosses her ankles as she practices cursive, solves problems, reads. She wear fake TOMS, cheetah print. Her sock- usually green, always bright- stand in contrast to the gold, brown, black rings of the animal print. Outside, at pick up, she crossed her legs, pulls a bag of Rainbow Loom into her lap, laces her fingers with all those little rubber bands. But under the mound of pink and purple, yellow, green, white, orange bits of rubber, her socks are bright in the afternoon sun, shining over the foothills.

Front row, left side, middle. Her pony tail sprouts from the top of her head, thick, heavy curls that swish on the back of her jacket when she moves her head. And move she does. In the classroom, on the schoolyard, they’re taking turns teaching one another. How To do a backbend. How to draw a muscleman. How to make tea. She teaches how to kick a ball high in the air, and they’re all sitting on the bench that lines the playground, watching, listening, taking turns demonstrating, and she kicks, runs, catches, chases; moves.

Three rows, thirteen desks. Front, middle, back. And tomorrow, I say see you later to all of them.

~Natalia