too much power

September 9: Mr. Diego has been sent around the different classrooms to watch how all of us teach and keep order in our rooms. My kids scare him the most so far. Apparently, without any prompting, Luna turned to him and told him that ruining lives was kid of her thing.

September 10: At the end of recess, our students separated to go to their electives. All the girls in my Girl Power swarmed towards me, screaming. Vivi thought it was hilarious that I was momentarily worried about my safety. She told me next time to hold up my hands and yell, “Too much power! Too much power!”

September 11: My kids begged me to show them videos of the 9/11 Twin Tower attacks. I told them I didn’t really feel comfortable doing that because watching that kind of thing is very different for the people who lived through that time. I didn’t want to relive how I watched footage of the towers falling when I was pouring a bowl of cereal for breakfast, how so many of my friends were kept home from school that day, how none of my teachers seemed to know what to do and we spent most of the class periods that day watching the news on the TVs that hung in the corner of the room. Miss Connie told us how she was actually talking on the phone with a friend in New York when it happened. The line suddenly went dead and then she turned to a TV and saw what was happening. Miss Jen was at her house when a friend came running in, screaming “We’re under attack! We’re under attack!” My kids seemed disappointed by my response, but by the time it was snack, they had forgotten they wanted to see it at all.

September 12: Today, I was upstaged by a worm. Ms. Mesa needed the classroom during electives, so I had to teach Girl Power in Precita Park. The lesson was quickly ignored when we sat in the grass and a girl found a worm in a patch of dirt. They all swarmed around it and ignored me. It got to the point where I picked it up and moved it to a new dirt patch, which made them all scream with disgust that I was touching it. For the rest of the lesson, when they thought I wasn’t looking, pairs of them would try to sneak off to the new dirt patch to get another peek at it.

September 13: Orlando was not invited to be a Jr. Coach again this year, but a lot of kids in his class were. He’s been talking about it all week, wondering why this was happening to him. I felt bad and invented a new job for him during program. He will help Mr. Diego get the play equipment before recess starts, help distribute them, and be in charge of collecting it all and putting it back in the shed. When I asked him if this was something he would be interested in, he got so excited. He gave me the biggest smile and hugged me. I need to hold onto the smile for awhile because I have a feeling before the end of the week I am going to want to throw his phone out the window while he watches.

September 14:

Thinking back on my characters in Panning for Pyrite, they all seemed trapped between two worlds, not sure where they fit in. Olivia is caught in between countries, too dark to pass for American and too disconnected from her roots to be Filipino. Miles is caught in between where he is and where he wants to be, full of dreams of travel and love, but stuck in a dead-end job and taking care of his estranged father. Irving is caught between this world and the next, feeling guilty for surviving when others didn’t and feeling like he didn’t deserve this extra opportunity. 

Songs: Olivia“Wish I could Forget” and “Not Dead Yet” by The Weepies
Miles, “In the Meantime” by The Ditty Bops 
Irving, “Roscoe” by Midlake

September 15: It’s impossible to ignore when this much time has passed. How could it be possible for this number of people to dislike me for over a decade if there wasn’t something deeply unlovable about me? It feels like I am begging them to treat me with basic human kindness and they find that too much to ask for. I get all the pressure to do all the work to make things better. Then when I can’t fix a two-way relationship on my own, I get all the blame. I am automatically set up for failure and there is nothing I can do about it.

September 16: I put “Heads Up” as one of my play centers when homework is done. There’s about a hundred cards for them to choose from and act out, but they choose the same dozen nouns over and over again. One of them is the song “Single Ladies” by Beyonce. They sang it so much that they asked me to play the music video for them. While watching it, I remembered all the stupid drama about it that happened between Kanye West and Taylor Swift during the MTV Music Video Awards. One of my kids noticed the post date of this video was in 2008. “Wow,” she said. “That’s the year I was born.” I have never felt older.




much love,
hedgie