October | 2004 | Lotus's Xanga Site

Battle fatigue

My head is reeling with the fourteen things I’ve chosen to care about deeply right now. I keep running into walls that just shouldn’t be there, catching my shoulders on the jambs of doors that were wider a minute ago I swear. I can’t open my eyes without feeling hardwired into a constant barage of confusion, frustration, conspiracy, manipulation and anger. We are all so tired.

We all seem so tizzied. Squalling amid activity and information in quantities too large to process. There is no mystery to the collective exhaustion. Are we afraid to shut our eyes for more than one fraction of a second?

I see beautiful worlds in my dreams. Impossible landscapes where the ocean flows into a waterfall and a forest sits on the edge of the world. I scrape my heart tripping over obstacles I didn’t see because of the largeness of the sky.

God help me with these invisible opponents. I don’t know how useful this sword is.

teacher´s day….

This symbol above does look like a Lotus… Or a star.. a Mandala or the like. It is the symbol of one of the schools i work for. There, I have an average of 300 students whose names I´m still to memorize. Tomorrow in Brazil we celebrate the teacher´s day. I do guess it is more commercial or symbolic, because it should actually be celebrated every day. Being a teacher is also being an eternal learner. You learn the topic you have to teach, of course, but by learning how people learn, and leaning how to deal with them is a nice experience as well. I will be an eternal learner, even if I stop giving classes. So, to the world, that is my best teacher…. Happy teacher´s day!

To you that come to my site from time to time, here are some pics a park in Atibaia, a nearby city in são Paulo state where I went last weekend. Pics are small here, but then you know… Click on them to have a closer look

Take care, y’all

School

If you have been reading my blog for over 2 years, you know know that I am a teacher. Now if you really read it, you may know that I used to live with a room mate till last December when she got married and moved. You may also know I teach at 2 schools: A language one(all levels), and a elementary one( also all levels). This year I started teaching at elementary school and it has been a total different thing. I had to learn to deal with people from different ranges of age(3 to 17) and different ways of learning methods. Unfortunately not everyone has the same ideal of learning, so it has made my goal of teaching even more challenging.

Once I got used to the scheme and lack of time even to Xanga, I could experience some good things about teaching. Two weeks ago the whole week got concentrated in the preparation of our “Science Presentation”. It is more a kind of a ‘research” presentation. The theme this year is our city, São Paulo, and its ‘faces’. Each grade took a part of the city. As I´m the coordinator of the 3rd High School group( last year in brazil), together with the Geography teacher, we put our minds to the project. My point here is not to tell much about the work itself, but to show some of the pictures we took from one of the areas we has to visit. These below is basically Paulista avenue area, one of the most important financial/cultural areas of São Paulo. Hope you enjoy. And by the way… that day, the students( 5 of them), Silvio( geography teacher) and I had lots of fun! I have been learning much by being a teacher. and althought I´m stressed to death, i think it is stil rewarding. I´ll miss that group….

Below, the girls…