friday top five

1) Returning to full-time teaching at World Relief!

2) Skype date with Karen Elizabeth

3) This song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9V1eiLPgtc

4) And this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvDQy53eldY

5) The kindest dude ever who stopped on his bike in the middle of the floating bridge during rush hour traffic and offered to change my flat for me


What were your top five this week?

straight from the horse's mouth

I have two new young Somali brothers in my class, and after class today one of them came up to me and said "You're a good teacher. I've never seen a teacher like you before!"

Uhh, thanks?

At least he preceded it with a compliment.

love looks like lesson planning

Lesson planning is hard. It takes all of my mental agility. It takes creativity I don’t have. It takes discipline of will. It takes humility, because more days than not I have to admit I have no ideas and ask my co-teachers for help. It could always be done better. It’s frustrating because it rarely turns out the way I expected or hoped. Every day that I triumphantly complete my lesson plan, it lasts two hours and then it’s done, and I have to start again from square one for tomorrow.

That’s what love’s like. Every lesson plan is an act of love to my students. Loving people well requires time; it can’t be done in a hurry as one task to be checked off the list. Loving people well requires that you know them, that you know them well, their strengths and weaknesses and interests and insecurities and their unique process of learning and knowing. Loving well demands focus and discipline of mind and will. It takes courage and humility because you can’t make people be the way you want them to be, whether your desires for them are noble or selfish. Loving well goes against all of my natural inclinations toward pursuing ease and cherishing independence and thinking about myself first and wanting other people to be conveniently manipulatable.

I see every day that my love is not patient, nor kind. It envies, boasts, and is proud. It sets up rules where there are no rules. It is always calculating the cost. It keeps mental record books, but only for others. It compares in hope of determining itself worthy. It always has mixed motives. It is sluggish and unreliable and often frankly unrecognizable as love.

But I am first loved. Before I love well, before I love at all, before I save the day or even make one tiny sacrifice, before I fix what is broken, before I make myself loveable, I am first loved. That is the wild kind of love that is teaching me how to love.

And you all thought I was the teacher.

i have a job

So to catch up those of you who don't know, I have a new job.

The organization that I was interning for, World Relief, offered me an AmeriCorps position at the end of my internship, and I accepted. I am now an ESL teacher for our refugees.

I have 35 students in a room that holds 20 comfortably. I have a full range of levels, from students who don't know how to hold a pencil because they're illiterate in their own language, to students who worked as English interpreters in their home countries and are fully fluent. My students come from every background imaginable, Western urbanites to nomadic camel herdsmen. I teach two hours a day, four days a week, but for every hour in class I spend five outside of class planning these multi-level lessons and designing materials tailored to my students' needs. New students show up in class every week, and stay anywhere from two months to a year, depending on how long it takes them to find a job. It's a crazy job. And I love it.

I feel like the luckiest person in the world that I get to have this job. I love my courageous, humorous, vulnerable students. I love the insanely cool staff I work with. I love the heart of the organization I get to work for. I love the journey of learning the art of teaching well.

I'm excited for you to come with me on this journey.
Maybe it will even make you want to find ways to befriend the lonely in your community.