Temper, Temper

We served 62 people at the food bank today. Being the week before Thanksgiving, and the last Friday of the month (we're closed next Friday) I wasn't surprised. I resisted closing the sign-in list until well after 3pm, but when I realized that the list went to 70, 45 of them had been checked in and 30 of them had been served by 3:30, I decided I had to go with the commitment made to the volunteers. They didn't even start leaving until 4:30. It was a long day; I didn't even take a lunch.


There seems to be a direct correlation between how much English a new client speaks and how many people come into the food bank to drop off donations, get something signed, interview to be a volunteer, and how many times the phone rings. If that person doesn't speak English or Spanish, add 5% (it occurs to me that none of the non-English speakers today spoke Spanish, either). On top of that, two little girls got in a fight - the littler one threw a plastic stool, which broke apart - and a baby was crying most of a solid hour and a half.


All the volunteers, including a brand-new one (who fortunately has worked at another food bank), were very pleasant to all of these clients today. It was hot and loud inside the trailer, and all of us kept our tempers. I'm especially interested to note that I kept my temper today, since circumstances pointed to other times when I've lost it: The food bank director was at the food bank less than an hour today; I didn't get a break; I didn't eat very well; the phone was off the hook for an hour so there were 12 messages to take and return; there were a lot of things going on all day that I had to manage.


This evening I was talking with Miz Jinkins about none of us losing our tempers today, and she said that she thought that "losing your temper" should mean that it went away, and "keeping your temper" means staying mad. I think the words "control of" are implied in the phrase to the extent that we leave them out altogether: "I'm keeping [control of] my temper" or "I'm losing [control of] my temper." Still, I like the visuals of "loosing" rather than "losing" - "I'm loosing my frustration." That is what it feels like to me - I loose my temper, it's out and bounces away.


Fortunately today I didn't lose or loose my temper. I think I may be mellowing out, because I know that a lot of the same conditions that have really tested me in the past don't get to me the same way that they used to. I do not consider myself a mellow person by any means. But I may be mellowing. How does that happen?

Los Juegos Olimpicos

I'm watching the Olympics on Telemundo via DVR. This is so that recording the Olympics doesn't interfere with recording anything on the SciFi channel, but it's also provided the unintentional benefit of improving my Spanish ear. While I can't understand a single thing said on La Raza's radio station, Telemundo's announcers speak so clearly and slowly that I can follow a lot of what's being said, if I want to. I never want to listen to the comments about athletes' performances, and this way I don't have to. I just turn off my Spanish ear.


I chuckle when the text on the screen says "baloncesto" or "balonmano" and in a blur of words from Jessi Losada I hear "basketball" or "handball." The same is true of the athlete's names, which make me wonder if the announcers just really practice the sounds. The interview with the proprietress of a roast duck restaurant was conducted in English and Spanish, with English being the common language between Leti Coo and the Chinese. I watched NBC prerecorded interviews with Michael Phelps and with Dara Torres in which their words were muffled, but not totally blocked out, by the Spanish translation. This made it easier for me to understand the Spanish. The interviews with the Spanish-speaking athletes I mostly can't understand as the athletes speak "regular" Spanish.


I also got a kick out of the Canadian synchro diving team member hwo counted off, "Une, deaux, trois, GO!"


On Telemundo, they're pronouncing "Beijing" properly, with a hard "J" as in "juice" and not the "zh" as in "leisure" that's being said on NBC.


Finally, I've had two dreams in Spanish. In the dreams my Spanish is perfect.

I'm A Winner!

The Year of Big, Fun, Scary Things has ended and I have received a certificate for completing it!


Of course, big, fun, scary things never end. That's life - finish one, and another appears in its place. Sometimes it's a big thing - or a fun thing - or a scary thing - and sometime s a combination of two, and sometimes all three. Shanelah would call the third combination an AFOG: Another F----g Opportunity for Growth.


Here's to growing! You don't have to embrace change, but you can brace for it.

Listening

When I listen to people speaking Spanish, I wonder, as I grasp for familiar words, if I sound like I'm speaking English that fast, if people learning English listening to me and my friends can't catch everything because of swallowed letters and poor enunciation. When I'm having a conversation in Spanish, particularly on the phone, I find myself saying "despacio, por favor" ("slowly, please") until they probably feel like they are pausing between each word while I catch up.


I've been thinking about this recently because last week I caught part of a radio program called Latino U.S.A, during which several Latino authors read from essays included in How I Learned English. Jose Serrano's essay was about how he learned to speak English by listening to Frank Sinatra. Sinatra, who was from Hoboken originally and whose accent never totally faded, had famously clear enunciation, which I've heard he learned by speaking with marbles in his mouth.


I know I don't speak totally clearly. My mother would often comment on the speech of her "native Californian children" whenever we said something like "Hurry up" or "It's in the drawer." When Zirpu and I are tired both of us drawl. But having been raised reciting "Hail to thee, blithe spirit/Bird thou never wert" in honor of Mom's elocution teacher Miss Spencer, I'm no mushmouth.


This morning I was showering at the gym when someone opened the curtain, despite the sound of water and the towel hanging on the hook next to the shower. She quickly shut the curtain and when I stuck my head out I said to her back, "Usually when there's a towel, it means someone's there!"


Except what it sounded like was, "Yooj'ly wen derz a towel, smeensumonezere!"

The Pink and Blue of It

I'm thinking about coloring my hair again. It's so short now that I'm not sure what color would be best. My hair is brown, darker now that I keep it so short, though yesterday I noticed that a lot more of it is grey than used to be. I guess I have to stop being smug about certain other people's hair being grey when mine isn't. Vanity, it's all vanity!


So, shall I go for blue, true purple, or back to hot pink?


I have dyed my hair pink twice. The first time was in 1988 when I used Manic Panic by just spreading it on over my hair. It barely showed and only lasted about a week. The second time, YaYaWOT did it and bleached streaks in my hair first. When Denver D picked me up at the airport and saw it for the first time, he said he would probably prefer my new hair color in the dark.

Yes, I am wearing a pink tiara in this photo, but the pink fluffy stuff is my hair.

I did the bleaching/hot pink job not long before attending my first CASFAA conference (that's where this picture is from - I'm looking through a zero in the number 2000). I had been in financial aid only about four months and a lot of the sessions were over my head - there was so much I didn't understand! But I kept asking questions during and after the sessions and asked them of the presenters as well the lender representatives I knew, who would sometimes direct me to someone else. No matter where someone is in the organization, or who they are at their home institution, at the conference everyone is always willing and able to share knowledge with the newest financial aid officer.


Shortly after the conference I was asked to sit on a committee, which I agreed to do because I knew it would help me get close to a lot of people who knew a lot of stuff, which I thought was important because I worked with only one other person (she thought it was important for me too). As the year went on, and I attended meetings and trainings, I was surprised at how many FA people seemed to know who I was.



At some point I realized that not only had I asked a lot of questions at the conference, but at the time I'd had pink hair.

Apricots

When I was a kid, many of us neighborhood kids would play kickball in the street in front of our house, with Mrs. Snyderman's Volkswagen station wagon for first, the manhole cover at the top of the street for second, and the corner between our driveway and that of the house next door for third. Home plate faced the intersection, so the players at second base were always the first to see the produce truck.


It was a big green truck with short white and green striped awnings that hung over the shelves of fruit and vegetables that were for sale. I don't remember his name, but I think it was Joe, followed by something Italian (I asked Mom if she remembered his name and she said she's not sure she ever knew it). He was balding, had thick hands and a paunch, and wore light brown pants and an orange polo shirt. While the neighborhood wasn't that fancy when I was growing up, it wasn't the ethnic enclave in which he probably did more business, but he was always friendly to us kids playing in the street.


I don't remember many adults buying produce from his truck on our street, but we kickballers always talked to him, admiring the size of the truck or the awnings. One day he had these small, slightly fuzzy yellow-orange fruits on the shelf. I had never seen that before, so I asked him what it was.


"This, Muffin," he said, holding one in his big hand, "Is an apricot."


At that time, my favorite thing to eat was dried apricots. They were sweet, tart, tough, chewy, and I liked to suck on them as if they were hard candy. I had never seen a fresh apricot and didn't even know they were something one ate without their being dehydrated. "I didn't know they came fresh," I told him. I didn't tell him no one had ever called me "Muffin" before (or has done so since), and I liked it.


The produce man gave me the apricot and said I should eat it. The fruit was soft, with a hint of the concentrated apricot flavor I was used to from the dried version, neither too sweet nor tart. The difference between dried and fresh was that between standing next to the radio and hearing music on the breeze. I liked that, too.

Asking For Help

I used to be really bad at this. In fact, I remember the first time I asked for help in a professional situation, while I was working at Letty Owings. I don't remember what it was that I asked for help with; I know that there were several things that needed to be done at once, and I remember realizing I can't do it all myself and It will be okay if I ask the children's counselor to do part of it. Recently I have been reminded that I have gotten better at it, because I asked for help.


It's summer and we have been getting a lot of produce from the Alameda Farmers' Market. There's a lot of it on Mondays and it has to be gone through pretty closely to pull the stuff that turned overnight. When I went in this morning there was plenty of time to deal with it all, but then I noticed ants all over the bread table. Just dealing with the bread and the ants took the time of four volunteers, the FBD, and I working all at once to get everything cleaned up (and we had to throw out many boxes of bread, unfortunately), which not only took an hour but meant that the things we would have been doing otherwise wasn't getting done.


As it happened, two of our usual Monday morning volunteers didn't come today. We had over a dozen boxes of produce that needed to be sorted and organized and when the Trader Joe's delivery came there was more stuff to display or put away, and bread and pastries to lay out on the table. I was sorting produce and was watching the clock, wondering, as always, whether we were really going to get done for service to start on time. Then I realized that I hadn't done the inventory on the front meat freezer and didn't know what was in the back meat freezer, the one where we store the meat when it comes in, and that the egg cartons still needed to be looked through and broken eggs tossed.


I asked the FBD if he could do the meat freezer for me. It's my job to make sure the program happens, and it wasn't going to happen without another body to tote and haul. Of course he agreed, even though I knew it was pulling him away from director-type stuff. Two other volunteers were helping with the produce already, and another volunteer was stocking up the set bags and boxes. Another volunteer arrived and offered to go through the egg cartons, a job I usually do because I'm not squeamish.


It's really really nice to have so much good fresh produce to offer people, even though it usually overwhelms me for the first few minutes. I just pick something to start with and I do it, with a running list of what else needs to be done in the back of my head. That MO is what has always led me into just handling everything myself. Now I remember that I don't have to.

Fun lesson

We had a dance lesson today. Because of the literacy training, I missed two weeks in a row, and I'm still adjusting to having just one lesson a week. Most days recently I've been feeling like I would prefer to have no lessons a week, feeling burned out on dance. And it is hard to go from three lessons to one, when you've had three lessons a week for three years (not counting leading up to the '05 Dance-O-Rama in Las Vegas, when we had five or six lessons a week).


However, I had fun at our lesson this morning. We warmed up with the west coast steps we learned from the video, and danced some foxtrot, and then studied tango and bolero. We got an introduction to a new step in bolero, which we haven't danced for awhile. Tango is my least favorite dance, because it's too staccato for me. Just when it seems like you're going somewhere, you stop. In fact, I refused to learn tango until after the aforementioned Dance-O-Rama when I realized that if I was ever going to dance in an All-Around I would have to know the six major dances. We reviewed a complex step we learned in a group class a couple months ago, so it wasn't totally new.

This photo is from the March 2006 Showcase (that's my re-purposed wedding dress).


I like learning new steps. Knowing lots of steps makes dancing more interesting to me. Zirpu and I want to be social dancers, not competitors. I tend to lose interest (and on bad days, patience) with lessons that concentrate on the finer points of technique and styling. Since we learned a couple new steps today, and they went relatively easily, it was fun. While we were dancing our foxtrot around the downstairs ballroom, I was thinking to myself, "This is fun, and it feels like a long time since I had fun in here."


I'm still thinking about what I do for fun, or could do for fun, by the way.

Not too sure

I went to the first of two training sessions for Literacy Plus, a program that trains and matches tutors with adult non-readers. The training was from 9am to 4pm and we had a half-hour lunch. The trainer asked a few times if we wanted to take a break, but we all (nine women) declined, and I know this is because all of us were stressed out because the trainer kept saying how she was behind and was only giving us three or four minutes to do the exercises. We weren't a particularly chatty group, either. I think they either need to re-examine what they want us to learn in 13 hours or they need to make a more realistic schedule.


Anyway, I'm not sure I want to do it. I am feeling overwhelmed. Among the things we discussed today were learning styles (such as reading, writing, listening, moving) and examples of different teaching methods; the material we may have to cover with a given student ("when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking" and word families); and how to check reading comprehension, just for starters.


I'm also feeling some anxiety about the actual pairing and teaching part. Do I really want to teach? I'm not very patient, and I grew up in a pretty demanding educational environment.
The experience I've had with the Homework Help program has bored me at times and I must admit sometimes I feel judgmental toward "the schools," like the time I was doing long division with a child who didn't seem to know how to multiply. I said something about the long division thing to the trainer today, during a private conversation - for all I know she's already thinking I am not a suitable candidate to be a Literacy Plus tutor.


Now that I've taken one whole day of the two-day training I'm already feeling kind of obligated to follow through and be a tutor. They ask for a six-month commitment and generally I feel like I can do anything for six months (though I've been proven wrong a couple times), and the tutoring commitment is only one or two days a week, not five.


Because I was thinking about this, the best part of the training today was when two tutor/student pairs came in to talk about their experiences and to answer questions. Both tutors have been working with Literacy Plus for about three years and both students had been in the program for about a year; everyone praised the LP staff and each other, and the students expressed a lot of gratitude for the program. I asked the question so all four could answer: What did you feel uncertain about when you started tutoring or started the program?


The first tutor answered with what I know I wanted to hear. She said that she didn't think she would be good enough, that she would do something wrong, and that she would let her students down. Then she went on to say that the students "are so hungry to learn" that you can't really let them down, because anything you teach them is something they want to know. The second student said that she was so excited to start learning that she hadn't slept the night before her first tutoring session. In that way, I suppose, it is really different than compulsory education; no one is forcing these students to come into the program, and I know that it is easier and more interesting to teach an engaged learner.


At the moment I am still undecided, however.

You can read this

But thirty million Americans can't. The lowest level of literacy in this country is defined as being able to read a bus schedule or total a deposit slip and about 15% of us can't do that. An additional 63 million of us can do that but not much else, which means that they aren't reading to their kids, succeeding in the classroom, working in higher-level positions, or even completing detailed paperwork (like a job application or insurance disclosure) without assistance. All of this is according to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy study done in 2003.


I attended an orientation last week as part of the Literacy Plus program at the library. It was the first step of training; there are all-day trainings both of the next two Saturdays and a follow-up shortly after we are matched with our first "tutees." There were eight people at the orientation, one man, seven women; three retirees; two people who work in schools; four under forty; one who was a literacy tutor in Atlanta before moving here.


We talked about the different roles in which one reads: Family member, someone who pays bills and makes household decisions; worker; community member; and life-long learner. The person leading the orientation asked us to think about what we did that day and separate all the reading we did into the different roles we had played. I hadn't really done much that day except stop by the bank on my way to a healthy checkup appointment in Oakland, but when I broke it down it sounded like a lot.

A) As a family member, I deposited a check, read the Patient's Right to Privacy document requiring my signature, and avoided getting a ticket by reading the street-sweeping-no-parking sign.

B) As a worker, well, I hadn't worked that day at the food bank or the Homework Help program, but I had read the news and the blogs I follow as well as the alumni magazine so I could write this later that evening. Of course I sent and received multiple emails about a number of things.

C) As a community member, I followed the directions to the clinic, and when I got lost getting back to the highway (which often happens to me in Oakland) I read the street signs and the "Entrance 880 North" signs while trying to get back to an 880 South entrance.

D) As a life-long learner, I read the instructions for the appointment (which told me to avoid ingesting anything but water before the appointment), read a memoir while waiting for my appointment, and reviewed the nurse practitioner's summary sheet at the end of the appointment.


I've been reading since before I can remember, and I don't even notice it unless I'm looking at a computer screen or holding a book. The people who had gone into an office and worked that day had even more detailed lists than I, and I was staggered by my own list. Are you?

The Dragon Lady

I read in my college alumni magazine that one of my professors is retiring this year. I was intimidated by her from the beginning because she had questioned my ability, as a mere first-term sophomore, to keep up with a 300-level history course. She was stern in class and demanding on papers, which we had to write every week. I was majoring in English so I wrote pretty well but even so I received back papers bleeding corrections and suggestions all over them. I said"groovy" in a discussion once and she let me know that word was too casual for an academic setting.


I respected her, but she scared me, so I called her The Dragon Lady.


One afternoon, perhaps as class was starting (because I can't imagine the context otherwise), she walked from the window side of the room to the middle and announced, "On my fiftieth birthday, I turned to my husband and said, 'I thought growing up would be easier than this, and I thought I'd be done with it by now."


As I remember it we all looked at her, mouths agape. Not only was everyone intimidated by her, but we were all under 22 years old. At the time I was thinking it was a funny thing to say to a bunch of people half or less of her age.


Now I know that it's the most valuable thing I learned all semester. I tell stories about my professors, but The Dragon Lady is the only one I quote word-for-word.

Striking It Rich... And Just Striking

The big news yesterday was that by the end of the first quarter, Hillary Clinton had raised $26 million dollars and Barack Obama had raised $25 million dollars for their respective campaigns for president.


Fifty-one million dollars. $51,000,000. That's a lot of money, to buy ads, to print flyers and postcards, to pay campaign workers, to travel, and to do all the other stuff candidates do to get people to vote for them. Not only does not everyone vote for one candidate, but a lot of people just don't vote at all, wasting a lot of that money.

+++

The teachers in Hayward started striking today for better pay. What's at issue is that the teachers want a 16.84% pay raise and the Hayward Unified School District, as of this morning, was offering between 7% and 8.6%. They already gave a 16.84% raise to a couple of superintendents last year and the teachers are asking for the same amount. It should be noted that teachers pay 100% of their health benefits; a teacher I spoke with today said she spends a third of her salary on benefits for herself and her children.


It seems that a lot of students and parents are honoring the strike, with so few students and substitutes showing up at Mount Eden High that administrators tell the students to either go home or work in the school's gym. Parents saw the striking teachers at Lorin Eden Elementary and didn't drop off their kids.


I could not find out how many regular, full-time teachers are in the district, but the Hayward USD includes twenty elementary schools, five middle schools, and three high schools (as well as two adult schools and student assessment centers).


$51,000,000 divided by 33 is a little over $1.54 million dollars per school.

Corporate education

I've been following the discussion and debate about the reach of corporations into schools, ranging from Coke machines in the hallways to Channel One's commercials in the classrooms. There is certainly the position of the cash-strapped school districts, which can receive a portion of proceeds from vending machine sales, or which need "someone else" (read: fast food companies) to manage their cafeterias so they don't have to pay for workers, and sometimes need some inexpensive (free) way to engage students in learning. There are also the people who wonder about the health of the kids when they're drinking and eating food with high fat and high sugar content - food that kids would eat if they were able to leave campus at lunch, and who worry about a captive TV audience. I had heard that companies were providing classroom materials, but that they were mostly science or environment programs with questionable objectivity.


Full disclosure: I went to high school years before Channel One, and anyway we only had four TV sets in the whole place. Hostess stuff was available for purchase and I usually got an apple pie three times a week. Few people ever left campus for lunch, because it was only 36 minutes long and the nearest McDonald's was 15 minutes away. When people left campus at lunch time it was to sit in someone's car and make out, smoke dope, or drink wine. I didn't do any of those things so I never left campus.


Yesterday at the library I was helping a third grader with his reading comprehension homework (the first part of which was me saying, "Settle down and read this so you don't have to do this later"). The article he was reading was about the Wham-O toy company. The first paragraph was a short overview of the company, and each following paragraph described one toy for which Wham-O is famous, without actually naming the toy. On the back side of the page, there was a message to the parent about how the purpose of the exercise was to determine if the student could figure out the main message of the article. There were also some questions the student had to answer:

What are the three toys described in the article?

What is the main thing you remember about Wham-O from the article?

What is your favorite Wham-O toy? Hint: Which Wham-O toy do you have at home?


My student had never heard of a Slip-n-Slide so I just told him the answer. I don't usually do that but it's not a very common product around here, and he knew the other two were the Hula Hoop and the Frisbee. Without any prompting from me he wrote that the main thing he remembers from the article is that "Wham-O makes great toys" and that his favorite Wham-O toy is the Frisbee, "because," he said, "that's the only one we have."


It was so obvious to me that this article, probably provided free of charge to the school, was really about creating brand recognition in the 7-to-9 year old set. So now I've seen it with my own eyes.

*For the record, this student does not attend a public school.

Uno amigo de la pluma

I received an email from one of the bartenders at Playa Fiesta, Charly. I'd sent him and the owners Hayward postcards I purchased at Long's.


Charly suggests in his email that we can practice each other's languages by writing. He says, "You'll try to write all your email in Spanish and I'll try to reply in English, later I'll write you everything in Spanish and you'll reply in English and little by little we will see our spelling errors and grammatical mistakes, I think so that this way our advances will be great very soon I'm sure."


His English is much better than my Spanish, but I think he is right. Writing Spanish should be a little easier than speaking it, since I'll be able to consult my diccionario (dictionary) and my libro de la clase (textbook) for vocabulary and conjugations without actually stopping the conversation. Fortunately for me, spelling in Spanish is much less complex and irregular than it is in English. Have you ever noticed that "phonics," which is a reading system that teaches children to connect letters and sounds, is not spelled "fonics"?


I've never had a pen-pal before. I would have been a great pen-pal when I was a kid, because I liked to write and read, and I didn't have a close friend at school so pen-palling would have given me something to do at lunchtime. I also made up a lot of stuff. I think my fourth grade teacher tried to set my class up with the class of a friend of hers in Rome. I don't think the Roman class wrote back to us.


Having a pen-pal to whom I write in Spanish will probably alleviate the obligation I feel about being in a Spanish class this term. I was going to enroll in Spanish 1B at Chabot Community College this semester, but it began before I knew I wouldn't be going back to CSU East Bay. I'm hopeful that Charly and I do write to each other for a long time.



Besides, No found a house to rent in the same area as Playa Fiesta and it's always good to have a friend who's local.

Ahhh, back at the dance studio. We've been away for two weeks, and it seems much longer.


Our regular dance teacher is out of town today, at her grandmother's birthday party. We had our lesson with our other regular dance teacher (who, I suspect, will be more and more regular for us as KT's responsibilities at the studio grow) and worked on Silver 1 waltz and rumba. The magic of the Arthur Murray System is, of course, that all the dances are interrelated, so we learned essentially the same step in both dances. Except of course that they are completely different. (-:


It felt good to get back to waltz. It feels like a long time since we've danced any waltz, and it's been a long time since we learned a new step, because we so recently had our check-out for Bronze 4. We've been dancing a lot of salsa recently, and merengue (ma-ren-gay); at our last lesson that's all we did and then of course in Puerto Vallarta we danced even more. Zirpu and I even led a couple of merengue/conga lines, complete with tunnels, because we are, after all, Arthur Murray Hayward dancers and that's what we do at parties in Hayward.

Hayward is in the house!

I taught several men and a few couples some basic salsa. One couple was really motivated to learn and so in half an hour I got them doing basics, turns, and the cross-body lead. Another couple sounded motivated to learn, but the wife kept saying that she "couldn't dance." I believe that if you can count to eight, you can dance (and for salsa you don't even need to count to eight; six will do fine), and I felt like saying "Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours." We had fun in the lesson anyway - lots of laughter, and dance is a means to pleasure.


Zirpu was out there dancing with the ladies who didn't have dance partners. He said his only regret for the week was that they didn't play more music he could dance to, because there were women who wanted a spin on the dance floor. This is how cool, in all senses of the word, my husband is:

Mrs. Lujan

When I graduated from eighth grade, my homeroom teacher wrote in my yearbook, “The day you stop learning is the day you die.” For twenty-five years I've wondered if she meant that you learn right up through your last breath, or if she meant that if you stop learning you die a figurative death.

My sense is that I will be learning through my last breath.




I know you're thinking, "You hung onto your yearbooks from grammar school?"