Look what finally came!

And it's not even on tracing paper, although it is a little creased.

It only took six months to get here and they paid me a surprise $3000 for the inconvenience, so I have no complaints :)

The Perfect Commute

I live six blocks west and five blocks south of where I work, and after months of zig-zagging through all the possible combinations of streets and sidestreets, I believe I have finally found the perfect commute.

I live on Mural Mile, so I get to see a lot of cool murals no matter how I choose to walk. But I like to start by walking past one that is still in progress:

I am really enjoying watching it grow a little bit every day; I think I'm going to be kind of depressed when it is finally finished.

Next I cut through what is the quaintest and most adorable alley in the history of alleys:

Those are cobblestones!

Look at that ivy!

That conveniently puts me by a fancy wedding dress store, where I ogle the merchandise for awhile:

After that I cut through the campus of Jefferson University Medical School + Hospital, which is fun because I really love hospitals (my dad is a doctor, so going to the hospital as a kid always meant getting to eat frozen yogurt from the cafeteria and look at the new babies). In the morning it's usually bustling with people in scrubs and lab coats, although that isn't really reflected in this kind of sad picture:

The last fun thing I pass before arriving at work is a Ross in what used to be a fancy department store, whose founders thought its free hat-trimming policy was important enough to carve it into the building:

"HATS TRIMMED FREE OF CHARGE"

After a productive day at work, I head home. First I walk past Dog School, which as far as I can tell is just day care for dogs. There are always a bunch of cute ones in the window, and they wag their tails and bark at you as you walk by.

In this picture the dogs are lying down in the window, which is why you can't really see them.

Then I walk past a day care for humans, which has even more adorable occupants. But I thought I would look suspicious taking pictures of the windows when kids were actually in there, so I waited until a day when I came home late to take a picture of the empty classrooms:

When I usually come home this room is filled with adorable toddlers playing.

This one is full of sleeping babies, and it's hard not to try and break in.

Next I go by my favorite restaurant, and since I was smart enough to stock up on their Halloween frosty coupon books last month, I can stop in for a free junior frosty whenever the mood strikes me (which is often):

Last but not least, I walk through the furniture at Uhuru Furniture and Collectibles, because as a boring old person with a house and a mortgage I am always optimistic that I will find a nice end table or something there.

So far no luck, but I have seen lots of interesting floral couches.

In conclusion, my new walk to work is much nicer than all the trash I walked through on the way to school in the Bronx, and no one wolf-whistles at me or calls me "mami." I love my new job!

Cognitive Dissonance

The first round of applicants to TFA for 2011 just got accepted, and now everyone in the office who was a TFA corps member gets to spend the next two weeks calling them and trying to convince them to join. It's weird to hear so many people having so many animated conversations (most of which start with "CONGRATULATIONS!") in our normally quiet office, I feel sort of like I'm working at a telemarketing company.

The other weird thing is having the conversations themselves. I am really glad I did TFA (obviously, or I wouldn't have decided to work for them) and everything I tell the people I call is absolutely true (you get great ongoing support, you work with wonderful people, you can get a Masters degree in two years for free, you develop really positive and meaningful relationships with some kids). But at the beginning of my first year teaching I really resented TFA for not giving me any warning that kids would throw desks in my classroom and curse at me, and now here I am calling accepted corps members and not telling them about eye-stabbing or getting called a cracker or crying every night for the first few months, because I know that would make them not join and that after they finish the two years they will be glad they did it. Somehow I have to convince myself that this doesn't make me a jerk.

Ouch

One of Ben's grad school friends is going through a rough breakup, and Ben tried to comfort him by joking that being single is probably better for his research productivity. When Ben relayed that conversation to me I feigned insult and said that I didn't think I hurt his research, to which he replied, "yeah, but you're very different from a real girlfriend."

Twenty minutes of frantic back-peddling and explaining later, I still have no idea what he was trying to say.

A Good TV Night

First, TFA got shouted out on The Office! Well, sort of.



(The second clip is from this week's episode.)

Then, I saw something new that I want on 30 Rock:

Ambition is the willingness to kill the things you love and eat them to stay alive.

How long do you think it will be until I can find that throw pillow for sale somewhere?

I must be really charming...

... because this morning I had an email waiting for me from the director of the fancy private school we visited yesterday, asking where to send his $1,000 donation to TFA!

AND I got another random check in the mail from Lehman! This one's only for $60, but still... they can't stop paying me for having put up with them for two years! I'm getting fonder and fonder of my alma mater every day...

The Other Side of the Achievement Gap

Today at work I got to visit a really fancy and really excellent private pre-K to 12 school in an affluent suburb of Philly. Since I don't directly support teachers of any specific grade level or subject area, I opted to visit the early childhood classrooms because I thought they would be cutest - and oh holy cow was I right. That place was absolutely magical, it was like every perfect school from a movie and your imagination rolled into one - Ms. Honey's classroom from Matilda combined with that sweet classroom from Kindergarten Cop combined with rainbows and glitter and pure unadulterated happiness. There were only 12 kids in each class (with 2 teachers), the building was exquisite, the walls were covered floor to ceiling with beautiful student work, the kids were ridiculously ahead of grade level (the pre-kindergartners I saw were reading better than the first graders I worked with at my old school), and they were able to have luxuries unheard of in test-centric public schools like unstructured play time, art and music every day, and more than 15 minutes of recess. The kindergartners have an incentive system where every time they do something good they get a penny in their class "kindness jar," and when there's enough pennies they get to buy books and toys to send to their sister school in Uganda. They got so excited anytime they earned a penny, and it wasn't even a reward directly for them! It was absolutely unreal. I would seriously go back into the classroom for 12 years there, since that's the only way I could afford to enroll my own kids. The only negative I could see was that they aren't allowed to have sweets, only healthy snacks. Lame.

Also, today at Rite Aid somebody stole my gloves. Well, technically I left them on the counter when I paid, but I almost immediately realized my mistake and went back, and they were already gone. I am very depressed.