#payitforward

Last weekend, sandwiched between our first workday back and our last weekend of freedom, a group of us ended up at a bar for happy hour on the west side of town. It was a random mix of people, all with the same intentions: to unwind after a long day, and to make the most of what little time we had left before we were back to the grind.

As usual, we made a conscious effort to avoid "shoptalk". And while the occasional reference to a student or school story slipped in, we were generally pretty successful. The topics of conversation ranged from recaps of our winter break plans to upcoming events to current news stories. One of my co-workers told us about an incredible act of generosity that took place in Canada. It starts like one you've heard before. A patron at a drive-through window paid for the customer behind him, as a random act of kindness. What makes this occurrence so unusual is that it turned into a random chain of kindness that continued for three hours and 228 customers! (Wouldn't you hate to be the 229th, who unknowingly ended the incredible streak?) Read the full story here.

As we marveled at the implications of such a simple act, we began tossing around ideas for recreating a similar sentiment at work: #payitforward. (Don't ask where the hashtag came from, it's all the rage these days.) The wheels were in motion, and by the time we paid our tabs, we had a plan. Over the next week, we would perform random acts of kindness for our co-workers, leaving only an anonymous #payitforward note as evidence. We had even decided on our first recipient, our literacy coordinator who, on top of his assigned responsibilities always ends up being a "fill-in" for random duties that pop up throughout the day (and never, ever complains). For once, I couldn't wait for Monday.

Monday morning, three of the original schemers spent their first planning period checking and entering all of the literacy coordinator's homework (on top of theirs!), and we waited anxiously for him to discover what they had done.

Unfortunately, I never saw his reaction in the moment. But I did hear him mention it later that afternoon, and I was secretly thrilled to see it spark the curiosity of our co-workers. No one knew how it had started, or what would become of it, but if nothing else it was a neat little way to start off our work week. To be honest, I was a little worried that it wouldn't catch on. We get so caught up in our day-to-day duties and tasks that it wasn't hard to imagine the grand scheme never playing out.

The original schemers had planned to hit as many people as possible ourselves in the first two days to ensure the trend continued. But to our delight, #payitforward started spreading like wildfire, even without us fanning the flame. People who were receiving the random acts of kindness were just as quickly turning around and paying it forward. In this first week, people have received everything from treats to coffee to break coverage to sweet notes written by children. It was exciting to watch, and I felt lucky to be on the "inside". A buzz was in the air, and it was the topic of conversation on multiple occasions.

At first, it was tempting to try to figure out who was responsible for an individual act. Many of us tried to decipher handwriting, question possible witnesses, and compare schedules to figure out to whom we owed thanks. I was just as guilty of this as anyone else. But eventually, we convinced each other that obsessing over the "who" defeated the purpose of the whole thing. The idea was to show gratitude not by making a big production of thanking someone, but to turn around and do the same for another unsuspecting teammate. Instead of anxiously trying to pay someone back, we were eagerly finding a way to pay it forward.

At our Friday professional development, numerous people mentioned #payitforward, saying that it gave them something to look forward to and made coming back after a long break much easier. Two of the teachers even started a similar "random acts of kindness" chain with the students in their advisory to encourage team-building.

I have had very little to do with this, but I am reaping so many of the benefits. It truly did make the week more exciting, and it filled the teacher work room with a positive energy that we haven't had in a while. Not to mention I was the recipient of some pretty amazing notes from sweet children that made my day.

Ours isn't a news-worthy story. It's no 228-person-chain-in-a-drive-thru-line. But it added a little something extra to my week and to the morale of our team. It has made me more aware of how much the little things can really mean, with a combination of thoughtfulness and good timing. Even if the official "#payitforward" movement ends this week, I hope we continue to find meaningful ways to lighten the load of our teammates. Work is so much more enjoyable when you know you aren't in it alone.

I dare you to #payitforward.

PS: While a few names have been tossed around as potential #payitforward originators, my co-workers still don't know who started the trend. It's been hilarious listening to them develop theories about its origin, and I've had fun adding in my own (obviously false) theories. Shhhhh.

Golden Globes & Pajama Party

It started with an out-of-towner. One of our co-workers had a visitor last weekend, and he felt like family after a fun Saturday night out. So we all decided to have dinner together the next night, before he left early Monday morning. That Sunday night dinner gave purpose to a day that typically just means the end of the weekend. I went to bed that night with a light heart, ready for the week ahead after feeling energized by spending time with good friends.

Then came the Golden Globes. Nevermind the fact that I can't remember the last time I've been to a movie theater, or seen a movie that wasn't an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks book. I wanted to watch the Golden Globes, dangit, and I wanted to do it with my friends. So I suggested a viewing party, and volunteered my friend's house of course, because I don't have cable. It slowly morphed into a dinner party, with the promise of pasta and sides, desserts and drinks, and most importantly, good company. When 5:00 rolled around and I realized that I was sitting in my bathrobe, 2 hours after I had showered, it occurred to me that it only made sense for this to be a pajama party. After all, we'd all leave early to go home and go directly to bed anyway. It may be a red carpet event, but it's still a school night, geeze. So I sent out a mass text, nonchalantly proposing that we keep it casual, maybe even think about wearing pajamas. I waited nervously for the replies, knowing that my friends are way classier than I am, but praying that just this once they'd be okay with taking the fancy down a notch.

Thank the good Lord above they happily agreed.

I love my friends.

So at 6:00, we all rolled in to my co-worker's beautiful and artfully decorated condo...in our jammies. We sat around his designer dining room table, passing the pasta, salad, garlic bread, bruschetta, and fancy cheeses...in our jammies. We ate our dessert on his expensive couch and stylish leather chairs...in our jammies. We watched the stars float across the stage in their dazzling ball gowns and handsome tuxedos...in our jammies.

Oh what a glorious night. It makes the week ahead seem so much less daunting, spending your last few hours of freedom with people you love, doing absolutely nothing that is related to work.

I think Sunday night dinner might be a new "thing". I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the pajama theme carries over, too.

Do You Notice Anything Different?

No, I didn't get a haircut.

No, I didn't lose weight.

No, I'm not trying out a new look.

But my blog is!

It happened shortly after I wrote my last entry about how the TFA experience changed and shaped me. As I was reading and re-reading the post to find grammatical errors and picture my friends' and family's reactions as they read it , I realized that the serene, puffy clouds floating in the background of my blog did not match the tone of the post, or any other post for that matter. I needed something more neutral. Something that could work for the harried posts I banged out after a particularly stressful day, the heartfelt ones that celebrated the few successes I've shared, and the weary ones that were painstakingly written after stretches of silent weeks.

So naturally I settled on the chalkboard-and-apple theme. It seems to sum it all up quite nicely, doesn't it?

After all, teaching has been my life for the past two and a half years. These two and a half years have collectively been some of the most life-changing, painful, exciting, and memorable. Very rarely have they been calm-sunny-day-with-puffy-clouds-in-the-sky, walking-down-a-winding-path-with-beautiful-scenery kind of days, as my last background seemed to imply. There have been winding roads, for sure. This entire journey has been a winding road. But it just wasn't doing my mood and my writing justice.

The next question is, "Should I change the web address?" Obviously I am no longer "Courtney in Carolina", so a name change would only be logical. Because of my lack of creativity, I default to alliteration. But nothing seems to fit. "Teaching in Tennessee" is too corny and doesn't quite encompass what I'm doing. "Navigating Nashville" makes it sound like I am writing a travel guide for this city, when in reality I rarely experience anything outside of the occasional restaurant or concert venue. I suppose I could go back to "Lessons in Love", but some days I wonder, what have I even learned? I thought of that name when I thought of how God was going to teach me about loving my job and loving people around me, no matter how hard it would be, but I feel like I haven't done either of those things very well.

I guess the point is, then, that I still have so much to learn. About a healthy balance between loving your work, but not letting it overtake your life. About loving people well, even when they aren't within your immediate reach. About loving my kids, even when they make mistakes and drive me crazy. About loving my co-workers, even when we disagree. About loving my family from a distance and when we're together. And about loving my life, no matter what, because we "only get one shot, one opportunity", as Eminem so wisely said, and because I have been blessed in so many ways.

Letter To A TFA Applicant

I recently received a Facebook message from a distant acquaintance, a senior in college who is considering applying for TFA and had heard that I had survived the experience. She's not the first person to ask for my advice or perspective, and she's not the first person I've been honest with about it all. But I'm not sure my response has ever been quite this honest or this thought-out. I think this could serve as a pretty good response to anyone who asked me about my experience, so I of course had to share. Read on.

Letter To A TFA Applicant

I joined TFA right out of college, and I will be very honest with you....it is a huge challenge. While most of your friends' first jobs will be 9 to 5s that don't require a ton of emotional commitment, TFA drains you of everything you have. Sometimes in good ways, sometimes in bad. You never stop working, and if you do, you feel guilty about it. I think everyone who applies for/gets accepted into TFA thinks that they will be the exception, that they'll find a way to make it work and that it can't possibly be as hard as everyone says, but let me tell you, IT IS.

I've always wanted to be a teacher, but didn't study education in college, so TFA was a good way for me to get my foot in the door. Except that it's more like getting body slammed through an open door on a second-story balcony and falling onto the concrete below. And still being expected to get up and go to work the next day. I say this not to scare you, but because I wish someone had been completely honest with me about exactly how hard it was. I heard a lot of "It's a huge challenge, but it's worth it and it's rewarding and you know you are making a difference, blah blah blah..." Truth be told, there were many days that I was sure that all I was doing was ruining lives and having mine ruined, too.

That being said, I wouldn't take it back. I think anyone who joins TFA and survives their two years would say that, too. I now work in a charter school with a handful of TFA alum, all of whom had equally if not more difficult experiences than I did, and they still stand by their choice. We were actually joking last night why people who have heard about our experiences would ever go and join TFA, but one of my friends said it best: it's because all of our terrifying and awful stories end with, "but I don't regret it". Truthfully, I don't. But you do need to know that it totally takes over your life and it wrecks you in a million ways before there is even a glimmer of hope. You can't apply to or join TFA for selfish reasons, or you'll never survive. You have to be willing to drop everything, move anywhere, and work under any conditions.

Some people's TFA experiences are more pleasant than others. They end up in almost "normal" schools, only qualifying as a TFA placement school because of the percentage of their students on free and reduced lunch. Most corps members are placed somewhere where there is little administrative support or discipline procedures, a lack of resources, and no curriculum development support. They find themselves "up the river without a paddle", with no idea what to do, and drowning in the unknowns (this was my experience). Some TFA teachers end up in schools that resent TFA and therefore treat them hatefully. A small portion of people are placed in charter schools or magnet schools, where they face different challenges like an overbearing administration and incredibly high and seemingly impossible expectations (which, ironically, is my experience now in Nashville). And none of those brief descriptions even begins to encompass how difficult each of those different placements are. One of the scariest, and sometimes falsely comforting things about TFA, is that you never know what you're going to get until you are placed in a school. I spent a lot of time thinking it wouldn't be "that bad", and as a result my world was rocked. But despite how hard it was, I fell in love with my kids and my co-workers, and somehow made it through. In the end, I left my placement school after my 2-year commitment because there was so much corruption in my district, and because I was in a rural region where there was not even a chance of having a social life. Not a day goes by that I don't think about my first "babies" and how that experience shaped me in so many ways.

I always laugh when people ask me if I "liked" my experience. I never quite know how to answer that question. It was the hardest, most exhausting, and sometimes most painful experience I've ever had. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can prepare you for it. But I formed some great relationships, grew in so many ways, and by my second year I could definitely see the impact I had in my students' lives, even if it was just a few of them. Did I like it? Most days, no. Could I imagine doing anything else? No. Would I recommend it? No. Would I discourage you from joining? No. It's an incredibly personal choice that only you can make.

The End.

Sounds harsh, right? Maybe unnecessarily so? Absolutely not. It would be deceitful of me to paint a picture that is bright and cheery and happy, glorifying the fact that "you are making a difference!" or that your work is "meaningful". It took two years for me to realize that I had actually made a difference, and even then I doubted the longevity of it. Or that it was "challenging" but manageable. It was challenging, for sure. Manageable? Ha. Most days I barely managed to get out of bed. I feel compelled to be honest, no matter how harsh it seems, because this is too much of a life-changer to be anything but. I think my fellow corps members would agree.

2012: A Year In Review

I had big plans of going to bed early tonight, after a week of staying up late at home and an awesome New Year’s celebration. And then I realized that it wouldn’t be New Year’s without a little reflection.

It’s hard to believe that just 12 short months ago, I was sitting on the edge of my bathtub, knees hugged tightly to my chest, sobbing as I thought about going back to work the next day (true story). Eastern North Carolina and Nashville hardly feel like the same lifetime, much less two chapters of my life that overlapped in a calendar year. In addition, so many other exciting events made 2012 potentially my most favorite year yet.

My year in highlights (and a few pictures):

The Big Move

My decision to join Teach For America was a career decision; teaching was what I wanted to do, and TFA happened to be the vehicle to jump start my career. Because of that conscious decision, I strongly desired to stay at my placement school longer than the required two years. I wanted to become a part of a community and build lasting relationships; I never wanted to be another one of “those teachers” that left after two years. Even after a tough first year at Enfield, I still saw a future for my career in that tiny town. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2012 that I started to question my desire to stay.

It was a tough decision. It broke my heart to even consider leaving behind my babies and my amazing coworkers, but it made me angry to think about another year working for a district that thought nothing of me and continued to make poor decisions for which they never suffered the consequences. I committed to my new job in March, and had a brief moment of doubt when our end-of-grade test scores came back with a 67% pass rate (almost double the pass rate of the previous year!). In the end, personal sanity and professional growth won out, and by June I was packing up and moving 600 miles to a brand new city, with the help of my always-supportive parents.

I settled in to my new lifestyle in a “big” city (consider what I was coming from, people) easily, and have been loving every minute of Nashville life. Concerts, bars, restaurants, shopping, Trader Joe’s and Panera – all things I had taken for granted until I spent two years in Roanoke Rapids, and all things I have since learned to appreciate and potentially even abuse (9 trips to Panera in one week? That might have been a little excessive.). The physical move has proven to be much easier than the career move. As is evident from some of my more recent posts, adjusting to this new “workstyle” has been incredibly challenging. However, with a healthy dose of rest and relaxation these past few days, I have a good feeling about the rest of this year. It’s mind over matter, and I am determined to go back to work with a positive attitude and hopeful for some much-needed changes.

Speaking of the big move, potentially my biggest life accomplishment to date happened in October of this year – I bought my first piece of real estate! I am the proud owner of a 1 bedroom, 1.5 bathroom condo on the edge of the city, less than 2 miles from both work and downtown, with a fabulous rooftop view of the skyline that has already provided the backdrop for many warm-weather happy hours. It was a huge leap of faith to make such a financial commitment to a city that I had hardly even visited, but I feel confident that I made a smart and exciting choice. I knew when I moved that I wanted to live by myself, and the price of renting a one-bedroom apartment was almost the same as the mortgage payment on my condo, if not more. With some serious research and reassurance from my dad, and a lot of frustrating interactions with Bank of America, I officially closed on my place on October 30 and have loved absolutely every minute of living alone and making it really feel like home.

Everything Else

Let’s be honest. Eighty percent of my life revolves around work. Therefore, most of the major events that have happened in the past year have something to do with teaching or Nashville. But there have been a handful of other exciting things that have absolutely nothing to do with either! And hopefully more to come, as one of my resolutions for 2013 is to have a healthier work-life balance.

I updated my wedding resume when I was a bridesmaid for the 6th time this May (my first go-round as a maid of honor!). My amazing best friend Jess married an equally amazing man in a beautiful ceremony, and the reception was an absolute blast.

2012 was an exciting year for “the girls”! In June, between moving to Nashville and starting my new job, 5/9 of us took a trip to Europe together. We had been talking about going back since our first trip all together in 2005, and 7 years later we were able to make it a reality. I wish all 9 of us could have been there together, but I’m already saving for our next trip. My condo has been overtaken by Europe pictures, and I can’t help but feel incredibly grateful to have had yet another opportunity to travel, and this time with some of my best friends.

Duomo in Milan, Italty

Venice, Italy

Innsbruck, Austria

Munich, Germany

Swiss Alps in Lucerne, Switzerland

Lake Como, Italy

In October, one of “the girls” got married, and it was one of the rare times outside of holidays when all 9 of us were together.

This Christmas, “the girls” celebrated our 10th Christmas party together with a 5-hour long tacky light limo tour and twice as many bottles of wine. I cannot think of a better way to spend a night with my favorite people. We followed the evening with a sleepover (typical!) and our first-annual mother-daughter brunch. We also found out that we will all be “aunts” next June – one of the girls and her husband are expecting! That little nugget is going to be the luckiest baby in the world – the most amazing parents (who both come from incredible families) and the first “girls” baby, so definite spoilage.

Check out the differences from 2003 to 2012!

2012 went out in style. It was my first real "adult" New Year's Eve, and the first New Year's I've spent away from Glen Allen. A group of co-workers and I went to a nice restaurant for dinner and spent the rest of the evening back at my condo, joined by a few of my friends from college. In lieu of cable, we streamed the CNN version of the Times Square coverage on my computer, and counted down to midnight on in the drizzle on the rooftop, met by fireworks on both sides of my building. And of course, nothing says Happy New Year like party poppers and 90s music, which both followed back in my condo. It was a low-key but fun way to ring in the new year with both new and old friends.

Goofing off with work friends.

RMC Reunion!

Bring it on, 2013!