Author Archives: olivia

May 31 2012
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Teaching Video

Teaching: I’m a First-Year Survivor

As I prepare to wrap up my first official year of teaching on my own, I find myself hyper reflective.

This year I’ve successfully administered the Heimlich Maneuver, managed various student anxiety and focus disorders, broken up near fist fights, and provided outlets for students to express themselves about challenging home lives that include everything from parents in prison to neglect and abuse.  I’ve grinned my teeth and beared it while being yelled at by parents, coughed on by sick students, and hated by those few kids that take an extra long time to learn how to trust.

I’ve taken deep breaths when my class would not be quiet or that one student felt the need to put on a show…

In short, I’ve survived.

But, I’ve also done more than survive.  I’ve fallen in love with every one of my students.  I’ve successfully led two back-to-school days in a room stuffed full with parents and navigated two field trips without losing any kids.  I’ve built a classroom out of practically nothing and learned how to shuffle to Party Rock.  I’ve scrounged together jackets for cold kids and field trip money for our Exploratorium adventure.  I’ve laughed uncontrollably and become a much tougher person.  I’ve pushed respect, caring, and the creation of a classroom family.

“Mrs. M, you’re kind of like my mom because you love us and spend all day with us.”

“Yes, I guess in a weird way, I kind of am.”

So even if the days are long, the work is hard, and I often feel like I barely survived, I’ll be back next year, ready to do it again with my same kids as they move on to fifth grade.

H-U-S-K-I-E-S, Huskies are the very best…

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May 30 2012
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Teaching Gallery

College for Certain

The charter school organization that I work for has a slogan, College for Certain.

Today, I watched what this means in my classroom.  After a field trip to Sac State yesterday, my students came in eager to talk about college.  Finally able to run their own morning meetings, I eavesdropped from my back table as our Husky of the Day, (our classroom is UW themed),  decided to ask the group where they wanted to go to college.

One by one they eagerly shared their top picks.  Duke, Harvard, UCLA, Sac State, UC Davis, Stanford…  An eclectic mix, no doubt, but a much more thought-out selection than you would have received at my predominantly white, middle class elementary school in fourth grade.

Listening to their lists, I was struck by the significance of their self-created conversation.  They nodded in support as new colleges were introduced and gave excited connection signals when their favorite schools were mentioned.  Some kids had already picked their future college roommates among their classmates.

It reminded me of my first experiences teaching as a guest teacher at a private school in East Sacramento.  There I had been blown away by the conversations that third graders would approach me with– “Ms. O’Bryon, would you like to hear my top five list of colleges?”

College, I thought, aren’t you a little young to have that list prepared?

Young or not, I’m glad that my students, a diverse mix of predominantly low-income kids, are receiving the inspiration necessary to share the same goals with their more affluent peers on the other side of town.

Image

Every Friday is college shirt day at my school. My favorite, above, features all of the colleges that our students were accepted to last year.

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May 29 2012
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Life, Teaching

Summer in 8, 7, 6…

Today marked 8 instructional days until summer vacation.  Tomorrow leaves 7.  Needless to say, I’m excited.

Over the moon would not be an exaggeration, (although my students would happily tell you that this is both an idiom and a hyperbole!).

It has been a long, hard “first” year.  I am ready for mid-week teacher pool parties (yes, these really exist), Saturday night concerts in East Sac, a Pacific Northwest road trip, plenty of time to work on my book, plenty of time to read other people’s books, and a week in Kauai.

Maybe I’m a little over ambitious.  Regardless, I am determined to make every last second of it count.  Bring on 7 weeks of bliss, I’m ready.

I leave you with my summer anthem.  It truly stays stuck in my head for weeks:

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May 28 2012
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Family, Home, Life Gallery

Family Sundays

I was going to save this post for Father’s Day, but then I decided it didn’t have to wait.

Growing up, my dad would wake up early every Sunday morning to make our big family breakfast.  All 7 of us.  Eggs, bagels, bacon, english muffins, orange juice.  Since most of us have grown up and left home, he went through a phase where he lamented that Sunday breakfasts just weren’t the same.

Until, at last, he shifted his attention to Sunday dinners.  Now, Sunday dinners are a marvelous affair.  He doesn’t just make food, he makes gourmet meals.  Barbecued macaroni and cheese with bacon, grass-fed burgers, free-range barbecued chicken wings, fried organic asparagus and green beans.  Turns out, my dad can really cook.

This little act of love, of cooking for all of us gathered around the outside table, means a lot to my dad.  What he probably doesn’t realize is that it means even more to us.  Of course, it’s not just the food.  It’s having all of us, (or almost all of us depending on the Sunday), back in one place.

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May 27 2012
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Home, Life, Pets, Writing

Happy Sunday!

Luna welcomes you to my new blog home!

Everything from Blogspot came with me, except for my followers/email list.  Please re-add me to your feed or follow by email!

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May 26 2012
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Teaching

No, we ain’t gonna take it!

I’m feeling a bit revved up.  And, yes, Twisted Sister is stuck in my head.  This week was hard at school.  I will do my best to express myself while being careful not to overstep any professional boundaries, but I really wish that I could just say everything that’s on my mind.

The hardest part about my job can be how I am sometimes treated.  I work my butt off.  I put my heart and soul into my work.  I care about every single one of my students, even the ones that are the most behaviorally challenging.  Fortunately, the parents of my most behaviorally challenging students have been supportive this year, so that’s not what’s eating at me.

I just wish that I could invite the families of all of my students to come in and spend a day in my classroom.  I would like them to see what it is like to balance the individual social, emotional, physical, and mental needs of 30 students simultaneously while also attempting to teach a class.  A lot of times, I only have a couple of minutes to solve problems that come up in my room, and it’s not because I don’t care, (imagine one student having an asthma attack, while another is crying under her desk, while two others are bickering… that’s not an unusual scene after recess in my room).

I’m a very reflective and pragmatic human being.  I am willing to admit when I make mistakes and grow from them.  However, there are also times that I feel like families have to be present in my room during the event and know all of the students involved to truly understand the choices that I make.  Being a teacher is not the same as having children, unless you have 30 of them.  I’m not saying it’s harder, I’m just saying it’s different.  You’re more likely to get the teacher to understand where you’re coming from if you approach him or her with respect and a willingness to admit that maybe you do not fully understand what happened either.

There, I feel better.

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May 24 2012
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Life, Teaching

Separation of School and Home

I know that I run a risk having a blog and being a teacher.

I try to use my maiden name for writing and my married name for teaching, but sometimes this is not enough.  Some students found the online me today.

Teaching can be all consuming.  Papers to grade at night, lessons to plan on the weekends, after school events to coordinate, parents texting and calling at all hours.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my job (most of the time), but I also need a separation of school and home.

So, tonight, when I discovered that I had been discovered, I was pretty disappointed.

Sometimes I need a little break to be me, even if it’s public, on the internet, in pursuit of my other passion, writing.

Hopefully, they found me so boring that they don’t come back…

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May 21 2012
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Family, Home, Life

Familial Insomnia

It’s 10:43 and I should be asleep.  I get up 7 hours and 17 minutes from now.  Anything less than 8 hours of sleep does not work for me.

However, I’m wide awake, obsessed with the concept of how many direct ancestors are responsible for me being here, typing this tonight.  Maybe I should not have slept in until 11, or taken that nap, or shared some of Alex’s mocha after dinner…

2,048 direct ancestors in the past 10 generations, to be exact.  Two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 great great grandparents…  I feel like I have the Math Curse that my students love so much.

Oops on the 2,046 instead of 2,048… Apparently my mental math isn’t as good as my fourth graders’!

Ten generations probably only gets me back around 300 years, (conservatively assuming each generation has children about every 30 years).  That means, we really have thousands of direct ancestors, far more than the 2,048 that I was patient enough to calculate.

This blows my mind.

And, it does not even take into account all of the great aunts, second cousins, etc. that we’re genetically connected to, (or their thousands of separate descendants).  The more I start to think this way, the more I start to feel like the whole world must somehow be related.  I guess it doesn’t help that my dad found some MacKays related to us in the 1600s, (I don’t think this automatically qualifies me as being related to my husband, right?).

What I also find interesting about all of this is that even though I connect most with my paternal last name, I really have countless last names in my background that are just as responsible for me being here.  According to my dad’s recent family tree research, which gets a couple of our lines back to the 1600s, I am just as much German, French, Prussian, and English as I am Irish, but since my last name is O’Bryon, I’ve always connected most with this piece of my heritage.

It’s fascinating to think that we’re really the result of so many people from so many backgrounds.  I have ancestors that lived in the original colonies, ancestors that were Native Americans, ancestors that migrated only a couple of generations ago from Prussia.

I am so many people.  You are too.  The math nerd in me can’t get over this.

A partial list of the last names in my background over the past few hundred years, maybe we’re related!
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May 18 2012
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Life, Travel

Portland: Mecca of the Hybrid Hipster

Last night Alex declared to me that he is a hipster.  He is out of the proverbial closet.  Pipe smoking, road-bike riding, hipster.  Apparently, this video confirmed it for him, even though I was pretty sure that his love for Portland, Berkeley, and messenger bags gave him away years ago.

Actually, we’re a new breed of hipsters.  True hipsters might call us posers, but I think we’re just a hybrid of the hipster and the yuppie.  I’m not ashamed.  I like organic food, shit yogis say, and, of course, Portland, (as well as yuppie things like homeownership and a regular paycheck!).

So, when a coworker/friend asked me if I wanted to spend 26 hours stuffed in a Prius on a road trip to Olympia for her roller derby bout that would include a night in our beloved Portland, how could I say no?  (And, seriously, how could this scenario get anymore hipster?)

Yes, I know, true hipsters do not admit their hipster identity under any circumstance.  That’s why I’m the hybrid version.

Here’s my top 10 hybrid hipster reasons that I love Portland:

1.  Dirty bars, (even if I want to exit the dirty bars at midnight 😉
2.  Revamped industrial districts
3.  Foodie food
4.  Voodoo donuts, (standing in line for anything makes it that much cooler, okay, not really, but I still like weird donuts!)
5.  Microbreweries galore
6.  Green everything, (trees, hillsides, environmental consciousness, bicycles…)
7.  Proximity to the Oregon coast, Columbia Gorge
8.  Dogs welcome EVERYWHERE
9.  Alabama Street & NW 23rd, (two neighborhoods that make me miss Berkeley… hello gourmet food trucks with picnic seating areas!)
10.  Isn’t Portland where young people go to retire?

Voodoo Donuts in the middle of the night here I come!
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May 16 2012
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Family, Writing

Poetic Obsession

I’m taking a journey through other people’s lives.  Through the stories of authors published, through their insecurities and perseverance.  More often than not, I hear myself in their stories.  Neurotic obsessions with the written word.  Undying insistence that they deserve to be published.

Maybe I do not deserve it yet, I often think.  But, I will.  I will write and write again until it works.  Until it clicks and all makes sense and someone will want to pay to read it, even if really, I only write it for myself.  Writing for myself does not pay the bills.

Each day I add agents to the growing list, I read stories.  Story after story of not giving up.  Author blogs.  Each day a different theme, a different message, still somehow threaded together, connected between entries, shouting truths at me.

Today, poetry.

First, it was Janet Fitch’s advice to read poetry to learn how to write.

Then, it was a young agent, stumbled across after chasing down Barbara Kingsolver, who when googled, I discovered was the poet of delightful oddities.

So, poetry it is.

My late grandmother was a poet.  Ever since I was a child, I’ve carried around this book from house to house that belonged to her.  It is filled with poems, pencil marked with her favorites, an extra, my favorite of her favorites, glued to the inside of the back cover.  Somehow, one book of poems, created an imaginary bridge between the living and the dead, a relationship between us over shared words.

Just reading poetry helps my words flow.  Poetry, poetry, poetry.  Such a simple, often overlooked piece of the writing world, yet home to so many wonderful secrets.  I never thought I liked poetry until just now.  Turns out I’ve liked it all along.

Any poets out there?  Any poems to share?  I can feel a new obsession brewing.  A goal, perhaps, of one poem read each night.  New inspiration.

On the inside front cover, the name Frank Schmold is written in cursive, a mysterious figure in my imagination.
One of my grandmother’s favorites I read aloud over and over as a melancholy teenager.
Rose petals from those melancholy teenaged years, pressed for posterity.
Last, but not least, the poem my grandmother glued to the inside back cover.  I’ve always wondered who or what it made her think of…
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May 13 2012
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Writing

100th Post: Writing Business Plan!

To keep myself focused, I made a writing business plan for the rest of the year:

May – June 7:  Research one agent/day to add to my query list.  Create spreadsheet to record submission guidelines, contact info, why I selected each agent.  I already have a list of 7 agents that represent authors that either are young/up-and-coming or wrote books that I enjoy.  Goal is to have 30+ agents on my list for summer.
June 8 – June 22:  Hello summer vacation.  Two weeks to edit/revise my manuscript before submission.
June 23 – 30:  Perfect my basic query letter, (to be tweaked based on information gathered on individual agents above).
July 1 – 31:  Submit query to minimum one agent/day, making up for any days missed on subsequent days.  Goal 31+ agents in 31 days.
August:  Post pitches for next book to blog, commit to next book idea, (I have four!).  Even if nothing happens to the first book, I am determined to keep moving forward.
September – October:  Research background information for next book, read similar books, non-fiction texts to support experiences in book.
November:  Nanowrimo!  Time for another 50,000 words!
At this rate, I should produce at least one book/year, (last book began in July, got rolling in November, will be finished June).
Last, but not least, I have to celebrate that this is my 100th post!  It has apparently been a very wordy year.
I love lists/plans/notes/calendars.  They give a sense of control over the future, making huge tasks feel attainable.
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May 12 2012
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Life, Travel

Travel Bug.

Growing up, I was obsessed with travel.  Scrapbooks full of travel magazine cutouts.  Subscriptions to Conde Nast and Budget Traveler.  A constant barrage of pleas to my parents to take me somewhere, anywhere, everywhere.

In college, I got close to living my dream.  I submitted a dorky audition video to a Travel Channel show.  To my amazement, I was invited to audition in LA.  I didn’t get picked.  Instead, I was interrogated by a panel of producers about my boyfriend situation.  Apparently having one wasn’t very desirable for “reality television.”  Oh well.  I would not have traded my boyfriend for the gig.  He’s now my husband.

Today, I am still obsessed with travel, but in a more subdued way.  The characters in my book travel for me.  Of course, I’d love to take their places, but my priorities have shifted.  Gone are the days when I would spend every last dollar in my savings account to run off on some adventure, or at least gone for now.

Instead, one trip at a time, as I work my way through an always changing list.  This YouTube video reminded me of how I once purchased $5k in film equipment in hopes of becoming a travel filmmaker.  I admire these guys for actually making it work.  It’s important not to let dreams die.

Here’s my top 10 dream travel list:

1.  Missoula, MT (Home to my aunt/uncle, scary grizzly bears, yummy beer, and beautiful wilderness)
2.  Gothenburg, Sweden (Home to my lovely cousin, her family, and midsummer)
3.  New York, NY (Still never been, want to see my cousin dance for the New York City Ballet, and live out Anthony Bourdain’s Layover food itinerary)
4.  Barcelona, Spain (My favorite city in Europe, Alex hasn’t been, I want to relive its Gothic streets, Mediterranean beaches, and vibrant markets)
5.  Tokyo, Japan (I still have a Lost in Translation fantasy of this city, I want to wander from Karaoke bar to Karaoke bar in the middle of the night)
6.  Buenos Aires, Argentina (From Evita to Las Madres de La Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires is darkly mysterious and reputed to be the Paris of Latin America)
7.  Paris, France (Yes, I’ve been, but a good deal of my book occurs here and I’ve been following the blog of a young family that moved to Paris, which is exactly the sort of thing that deeply inspires me)
8.  Maui, (Okay, I know I’m going to Kauai this summer and have been to Maui before, but I really want to take Alex on the road to Hana and to Mama’s Fish House)
9.  Dalmatian Coast, Croatia, (Google image it for instant explanation)
10.  Prague, Czech Republic (Unbearable Lightness of Being is one of my all-time favorite books, takes place in Prague, MUST GO.)

What’s your list?

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