Horse manure, new castles, Bavarian history lesson, and München!

Chad Shaw, social studies teacher, added to the trip at the last minute who loves the dichotomy between America and Europe.   Oh my gosh. Where to begin. Today we laughed all the way to Neuschwanstein castle. From Nyc accents and hot chocolate. As a group we have been opportunistic in getting off the path both literally and metaphorically. We have seen member of the group in such a new and personal light that it makes trips like this so much fun. The spirit of "la adventura" is alive with these people. As we hiked the hill up to the castle constructed by Crazy Ludwig II, we witnessed beautiful horses leaving the fine scent of the farmland of Bavaria. This was a mere nuisance to the pure joy one witnesses when seeing the castle up close. The group toured through the castle constructed in the 1860-1880s, we gained an appreciation of the whimsical building and oddity that is the this castle. Meanwhile we experienced the welcoming German tour guide and found new heights of humor. Some serendipitously taken photos were presented to us within the castle. At lunch we got a taste of the gastronomical wonders of potato salad, that tasted just like my Swiss mother's, and braised chicken. The best part was we could immediately tell it was food produced within minutes of the restaurant. Eat local! Post meal, the herr produce historical relics of May pole celebrations. Interesting and quaint. From there we travel on to Munich. What a city. Clean. Orderly. German. City hall glockenspiel chimed at 5 as we walked through the Marienplatz. Travelled to the hotel and we settle in for a heavy but important lesson tomorrow. As we learn we find struggle and hard topics teach the best lesson. Guden nacht.

Pisa

Hi, my name is Delaney. I am one of the students that got to go on this trip. I am a junior in high school and I am so exited to be apart of this trip. We have been seeing many new and exciting places. 

Today we went to the leaning tower of Pisa and it was so much fun. We got to see that in person and I didn't realize that there was a church to go look at or shops around. I thought it was just the tower but it wasn't. I also found out that Michael Angelo didn't build the whole tower. Just the first three floors. 

We went to visit the church and this was the ceiling.


They repaired it after the original burnt down in a fire. It is also tilted. Not just the tower. All the buildings here are tilted which was interesting. I had fun throughout the day  

And We're Off! (Kind Of...)

Hello, my name is Liza and I am one of the lucky students to be going on this trip. Being the corageous out person I am I decided to sign up for blogging for the first day. I was suppose to hand over the designated blogging iPad after we reached Rome the next day but it seems as if things never go to plan.  Sunday June 5th: Everyone in the group arrives at 10 am ready for out flight at 12:45 pm that afternoon. This is where the adventure begins. As we wait at the gait our flight gets delayed again and again until we are able to leave at 4, meaning we will miss our connecting flight at JFK. 

 

The next few hours are a blur of flying scrambling off the plane and searching for any flight that will get us to Europe, be that flight landing in Rome or London. But time doesn't work in our favor. We have no other options other than take a flight at 8 pm the following day, leaving our group stranded in New York for an entire day. We end up spending the night on the floor of gate B25 while speakers blared about not smoking in the airport and arriving flyers loudly walked by.  

Monday June 6th: Despite the current situation of missing out on an entire day of our tour, we make the most of what we got. We visited the 9/11 Memorial, Grand Central Station, the Empire State Building, Times Square, walked down Broadway, experienced the New York subway, and even say a Gucci store. Each member of the group walked over 9 miles that day on an average of about 4 hours of sleep. 

 

 

Looking back on the last two days it seems as if nothing went according to plan. And really nothing did. All I can say looking back is that I'm glad everything happened and I wouldn't change it for the world. Ruined plans have a way of making a trip memorable,nd boy are we off to a good start. 

 

 

 

   

You can't always get what you want-Rolling Stones and travel style

Travel Style...help us Angelina, we pray!

  Today I'm flying all solo on the ol' iPad hoping this blogging experiment will work. So here's one more before we head off.  Travel style....discuss. Do you have any idea how many web pages and Pinterest boards spring open when you google search "travel style"? I lost count after seventeen- hundred, sixty-three. And of those, fifteen-hundred feature Angelina Jolie. I guess when you are flying around the world adopting children you need to have a savvy stylist to go along.  I know... This is supposed to be an educational tour but I'm getting life lessons pushed out here! (And don't think just because you are one of the only three males going that this stuff isn't critically important and, dare I say, life-changing. Just look at what good style did for Angelina, a girl who attended her first marriage Ina t-shirt with the grooms name written in blood to a woman who wows the red carpet.) I also have proof that this is a much-needed education in math for males, as witnessed by my brother's astutely inept calculations on the last blog entry that 3 skirts + 4 tops = 12 days. Even an astronaut knows that just equals...well...B-squared  (boring and B.O.) So here's a list of fashion must haves for touring Europe: 1. Large dark glasses (so either people don't recognize you as an American movie star or they THINK you are one--much more likely) 2. Floppy hat (see above.. It's part of the movie-star mystique) 3. Cross-body bag, preferably leather and clutch sized. (This is so thieves and pick-pockets and muggers have to actually hurl you physically across the piazza as they rip the bag from your body as opposed to simply slipping it off your shoulder and running like mad as you scream Aiuto! Which I think means "stop" in Italian.  4. Perfect lengthed shorts: which means neither "booty" or "Bermuda." Now this is a tricky one and may require hours of shopping NOT at American Eagle or Eddie Bauer. These must be constructed of this season's go-to fabric called...well shoot I packed them already so I can't tell you...but it's something similar to the curtain fabrics used by both Maria von Trapp and Scarlette O'hara to construct comely outfits for children and seductresses. 

Kute kids' Klothing

5. Something that shows the shoulder- but NOT the arm. Yes, this is the travel look of summer. Something either missing the shoulder seams or slipping somewhere short of the Famous Flashdance sweatshirt scene.. (Everybody say "if you close your eyes you can see the music") 6. Perfect pair of wedges (just to be clear for my brother... That's not the same thing as a wedgie...these are shoes) 7. A nude lipstick (really? What's the point? If God would have wanted our lips skin-colored....plus it's just embarrassing to say) 8. I will spare you the undergarments (but suffice to say that you don't want bra straps showing so just get ready for that skin blister you're going to have under your left arm pit after a 17 hour day in a strapless equipped with rubber stay-put band liners). NOW THAT, my friend, IS AN EDUCATIONAL TOUR!  But here's the thing...what you're supposed to look like, and what you feel like as you attempt to feel like what you're supposed to look like are two different animals. It's sort of like, "I've always wanted to be one of those women who wear floppy hats through Europe...but I always feel like a goofball wearing a truckers cap backwards every time I try to pull it off." Anybody smelling what I'm saying? I mean, we all look at Angelina and go, "ahhhh." But try to emulate and all you're going is,"I am a fraud!" And there you have it. Right back to boring and body odor. Europe here I come!

What you want

What you actually end up looking like

     

T minus 48

I realize that "T-minus" anything is a term probably lost on anyone who was born later than say....December 7, 1972 when NASA launched its last lunar mission with Apollo 17. In fact I have had to come to terms with the fact that several of the students going on this trip were not even born in the same century as the lunar launches. Yes, they are the true 2000-ers *gasp* millennials! But all that aside, one has to wonder if packing for the moon for 12 days was any more difficult than packing for Europe for the same amount of time...in a 20x17x9 carry-on and an airline-approved "personal item."

Eugene Ronald and Harrison all packed and ready to fly

I have this recurring nightmare where I wake up crying out, "Does everyone have their passport?!" And then the airline security people pull me out of line yelling, "You call yourself an English teacher? Everyone knows that everyone is a singular pronoun requiring a singular his or her to its antecedent...does everyone have his or her passport!!!! And then in a half-wake stupor I stutter, "But wouldn't a singular pronoun require a singular verb, has? Wouldn't it be everyone has? "Dummkopf!" they cry! (Dummkopf being a word I once heard on Hogan's Heros, another thing these kids are oblivious of...and why they should utter German pejoratives at DIA is beyond me). Would you say he does has!!??

At this point I give up and just tell them I'm a social studies teacher, which is a lie, but they buy it, smile, and send me packing. 

Speaking of packing, did I mention how hard it is to fit 11 days worth of fashion savvy outfits into a carry-on? 

 

 

 

Here we all are ready to fly...t-minus 48 and counting

READY TO FLY? #Travelingtimes16

On Sunday June 5, I and 15 other travelers--high school kids and their parents and one grandparent--are flying off to Rome. We are going to wipe the dust of lil' ol' Eaton off our irrigation boots and spend 11 days traveling north from Rome to Prague to see the world.

But before we go, I wanted to set up a really cool way for the kids to share their experiences.

WARNING: Whenever a teacher says she wants to do something "really cool" and "for the kids" one can bank on the fact that it will involve an entire morning, pajamas, several cups of tea or coffee and a strong look of consternation.

Check. Check. And Czek Republic (did I mention we are ending in Prague?).

So today is day NUMBER 1 of the travel bog. Yes, I just said BOG because I have, indeed, spent all morning in my PJ's trying to figure out how to add an Instagram widget to my blog page after creating an Instagram account Travelingtimes16 (check us out). Did I mention I went to the Verizon store and bought a new phone and a portable keyboard for the iPad so they could have the equipment they would need?

This is me trying to configure technology--and I am stymied stupid!

But I had this crazy idea that I would let the kids, yes, I just said kids, do the blogging on this trip...learn something, share something, give them a voice.

I'm fairly certain that there isn't a teacher alive who has NOT muttered these words, in her pajamas at 10 am: It's exhausting being a good teacher.

Because a mediocre teacher would simply take 15 people to Europe, right? But a GOOD teacher would let them blog. And a GREAT teacher would a way to post up the daily Instagram photo on that blog in a clever widget on the side bar.

Time for clothing and a shower and time to slide it back to GOOD. Great just isn't gonna happen today.

Can't even express how excited I am for this adventure! More to come!

A year of Charlotte

So, first of all to those of you who have been waiting and those of you who have been asking....Cheeky Teacher is back up. It was 2011 the last time I posted. I was a year post-residency and I believed I might, maybe could, be a writer.

And then life caught up--the doubts, the perfectionism, the underlying shame that has defined my life of "not enough" ________ (fill in blank here). Time, talent, beauty, wealth, knowledge, chutzpah, confidence. And thus I murdered the one true friend I have in life...me, the writer.

So that brings me to my second point: being a nana. It started three years ago when Amelia was born, studious and adventurous, she took my heart by storm. Then came Madison, a raven-haired conversationalist who charms with her impish smile. Then little Lucy with the courageous heart and breath holding eyes. Bodie, the tiny new man among the women with his determined brow and sweet curling smile. And along the way...Charlotte.

Charlotte wasn't planned exactly. She was the child of the daughter who fell in love at college...a dangerous combination of words.  And Charlotte became the reminder...the flooding back to the girl I was. The girl that was destined for the University and becoming the world's savviest engineer...making millions by 30, traveling the world, giving my mom and dad the things they'd never had or given us kids.

But here's the problem...I wasn't really that good at math--B's and C's, ya know--which in my heart equaled F's. And I really didn't fully comprehend acceleration and derivatives, Fortran IV and electrical circuits and besides....there was this boy...

And the rest is history. The history of a life and its shame...for its failure when that boy grew up five years later and decided he didn't want to be married to me. For the reckless man I re-married hoping to ease my aching heart...for the even more reckless aftermath of the car wreck that became my family...the ambulance ride, figuratively speaking, that carried away that first baby girl and her sister as I watched bleeding from the shoulder of the freeway, struggling to clutch to my heart the two daughters that were left.

How we survived I cannot know. Some days I'm not sure I did. All I knew was shame. Shame was the legacy I endowed on my daughters--they received it like daily doses of bad medicine. I recited shame like scripture. No self-punishment seemed harsh enough; I posted it on my door post in Biblical 83 point font.

So when Charlotte was conceived I vowed to do it differently. To welcome her life with open hearts and open arms in a way that I wish someone would have done back in college on the day my daughter's life was first made certain to me, the day the college health nurse told me that I was pregnant, and in the same breath told me that the next step to take was the abortion clinic. I have never been more alone in my life.

But through the grace of God, and a boy who said, "I want to marry you," my first daughter did not become the victim of my shame. I adored her growing life, and I loved her, even as I despised myself. I gave her every joy I knew, even as I denied them to myself. I cherished each daughter, even as I failed to cherish myself. And somehow, through that same grace, my daughters survived me again...and not only survived but have gone on to become the four most beautiful women I know.

And this post...the return of Cheeky Teacher is a tribute to the end of that shame. Brene' Brown says that shame thrives in silence. She is right. And this is my public proclamation--my art.

My art...it is not perfect. It is not perfect. But it is made in love. My life, my life is so very NOT perfect...but I have loved, and loved with my whole heart.

And so I share. Because only in sharing can I ever hope to rewrite the laws that have been chiseled on my door post.

Daughters--shame does NOT live here anymore. I'm so, so, sorry it took me so long to understand. I pray for redemption every day.

And to my grandchildren--my four precious grandaughters and my new baby grandson: I give you my art. To baby Charlotte--I give you your first year. I'm so glad you came.

Love,
Nana

Cheekyteacher: The end to my era: How do you write a new best seller after Harry Potter?

Cheekyteacher: The end to my era: How do you write a new best seller after Harry Potter?

How do you write a new best seller after Harry Potter?--saying goodbye to a generation of book readers.



When the Harry Potter Children grow all the way up.

Tonight...July 13, 2011. Mark it on your calendars. Why? Because this is the last night of life as we knew it. Tomorrow night at around 3 a.m. begins a new era: life without Harry Potter. 

Sure maybe there will be re-runs and re-reads. But this is the last day of that “pins and needles” anticipation, movie marathon, book roundup--waiting for the final episode of the final book.

I speak not as a radical HP fan, not as an avid reader of the 7-book series, but as the mother of an 18 and 15-year-old whose childhoods were defined by J.K. Rowlings’ famous nerdy protagonist. And I find myself reflecting as a bystander, a fan-by-proximity. And what’s more...I find myself feeling rather nostalgic.

It began earlier this evening, when I took a break from the 7-movie marathon going on downstairs to look through Target ads for extra-long college sheets, and bottles of Tide and dry-erase dorm boards, and it occurred to me that my daughter, and the class of 2011, is heading off to college exactly as Harry wraps up his final quest on the big screen. And for me, there’s something sad and poignant in it--because I think we may have just seen the graduation of the last generation of kids that read books. I mean real, live, hard-bound, 700-page paper books.

She was only in third grade when that Troll Book order arrived with her first Harry Potter novel--The Sorcerer’s Stone--a monster of a book with an innocuous looking little wimp in glasses on the front cover. 

I told her she would have to wait for me to read it to see if it was okay for her to read--“not too creepy or Satanic” I think I  have said back then.

But I never got around to reading it. And doggone if that little skunk didn’t just go ahead and read it anyway.

And that's it--she was hooked. And a year later she had her little sister hooked. And by the time the fourth book in the series came out, I found myself elbowing through a giant crowd at Borders Books at 11 p.m. on a school night in order to the be among the very first to get The Half-blood Prince when it was released at midnight. 


That’s what moms do, isn’t it? You take your kids to the things they love, and I couldn’t help but grin and watch, baffled, as they hammered away fact, after fact in the Harry Potter Trivia contest. I mean, who else knows that Dumbledore’s full name contains something as peculiar as Albus Wolfrick Percival something or other? Well...Harry Potter fans, that’s who. My kids, that’s who. In fact, “fan” just doesn’t do it justice. These are children who feel as though Albus is their grandfather and Harry is a brother. (Ron and Jenny have a mum and dad, so they’re more like cousins) but Hermoine and Harry--they’re just part of the family. 

I wonder how many other moms have chuckled this week watching their grown kids lie in the hammock in the sun and re-read (no re-read is too mild) re-DEVOUR books 6 and 7 so every detail over every Horcrux can be fresh. As I listen to the voice of Richard Harris give way to Michael Gambon rumbling up from the basement, I wonder how many other families are running a 7-movie marathon tonight. My kids started somewhere around lunchtime and it will be around midnight by the time they’re done. Only nowadays they can drive their own friends home--no more tent in the backyard with an extension cord to the laptop or Ariel and Belle sleeping bags.

Years ago, three little kids rode a train to Hogwarts and stole my daughters’ hearts. Today, like time-lapse photography. they’ll watch Daniel and the gang transform from 10-year-olds into 19-year-olds in a span of less than 12 hours. 

And here’s the thing--tonight it’s the same thing for me. Tonight it feels like it’s only been a matter of hours. One morning I woke up and a third-grader was sneaking Harry Potter under the covers with a flashlight at night. In less than a month, I’ll be sending an 18-year-old away to college praying that Harry Potter is the worst thing she'll ever sneak. 

It’s like Slughorn’s fish--poof! It’s gone. It’s like magic of the worst kind. And tonight I can hardly bear it.


Tomorrow we'll probably set up our soccer chairs at the movie theater shortly after noon and wait in line with the hundreds of other fans who have come to see the last big-screen appearance of their childhood heroes.


This will be the fourth midnight showing of Harry Potter for me. Last time the temperature was merely a few degrees above freezing as we hunkered down with blankets, hats, and mittens in line waiting for the Deathly Hallows Part I.

I've actually read that one, and the one before that--I owed it to my girls. And, sure, I like them just fine. But the truth is I’m never going to be one of the real fans--the truly passionate, obsessive, trivia-memorizing readers of Harry Potter. I’m not.

So why do I go to midnight book and movie releases and sit through 10 hours of Harry Potter re-runs?

Because there are two girls in this house who ARE the real deal. Because Harry Potter has been part of shaping their entire childhood existence. He and Ron and Hermione have grown up with them like neighborhood kids, and I’ve been like the mom who watched out the kitchen window while they played. 

I was there when Harry grinned and climbed on the back of Hagrid's motorbike, and I will be there when he goes to the train station to say goodbye to his own kids. And then, poof, just like that it will be done. And life will move on in a new way. 

I love Harry Potter with all my heart because I have delighted watching my girls delight in these fanciful, fantastical novels with all my heart. And when those closing credits start to roll and hear that final theme music, I know I'll be bawling like a baby. 

Because saying goodbye to Harry Potter will signal the end to an era at our house. The end to four-person family dinners and movies; school projects and homework marathons; the end to days when girls could talk to cats, dressed up from a box of old clothes in the basement, built secret forts in the cedar trees behind the house and laid beside the pool with a two-pound novel inches away from their faces reading and reading and reading again. 


I wonder how long J.K Rowling grieved after she set down her pen having written that final scene on the platform. And I wonder if, sometime soon, she will pick her pen back up and begin a new story. It couldn't be easy after such incredible success, and you couldn’t really blame her if she never tried.

But I know one thing for sure. You can guarantee that after I give that final wave through the back windshield of the car as we pull away from the college, that as soon as the tears dry, I'll start scribbling on the next series of my life. Because if there’s one thing I’m a fan of...it’s of life... and of my daughters who have made it the best, best-seller ever.

In the beginning was the word—The dangers of grading...in the hot tub

I love to read. But even better, I love to read in the bathtub. There is something…call it amniotic…about soaking in warm water absorbing words. Now I just can’t imagine I am alone in this pursuit. I can’t help but feel that there are other literature lovers who, like me, love to turn the faucet on as hot as human physiology will permit— just short of shutting down from shock or coma—and then soak like human stew until the water cools to gazpacho.

But I am queen of tub reading. I have been since before my Judy Blume years, even before Beverly Cleary and Beezus and Ramona. Why, I have a wavy copy of Stuart Little that proudly shares a box in the garage with a sister paperback of Wuthering Heights that both look like they came through the CSU Library Spring Creek flood catastrophe.

I have read in the tub with Phineas when he jumped with Gene from the tree and I have wept over Little Ann and Big Dan with tears that were warmer than my bath water. It is a private affair—dim lighted and reclusive, and I have found I can get sometimes nearly three hours out of a good full tub of steaming hot water—enough to induce a complete mindless euphoria I like to call fictionoblivia.

But because of this word-n-water habit, good or bad, I have developed another habit—a bad one. GRADING in the bathtub. And it is this bad habit, I’m pretty sure, that led my husband to finally install a hot tub in our back yard. NO students in the world wants to know their teacher read their their essay on Raisin in the Sun while Lazin’ in the Tub. (I could go on with Grapes of Bath and more, but I’ll spare you).

So now the hot tub solves some issues. First of all…it solves that dilemma of reading essays in my bathroom, and the even better…the water NEVER goes cold.

But there is, as I have indicated earlier, one horrible side effect of grading term papers in the hot tub…a little something I like to call it the “distressed essay” look. This is the term paper that takes on the fluted paper muffin-cup-liner look—like the wavy edges of a 1950’s prom dress. I mean, no matter how hard you work to hold them up out of the water, one or two always seem to suffer the side effects of excess humidity. And short of ironing every paper before I return it, I have handed back one or two…or three…or six…papers with inky comments that bleed a little on the page or crinkle a little louder than the others when they’re handed back.

But last week beats all—BEATS ALL.

Last Saturday as I set up my stool and briefcase (filled with 120 American Lit. and AP Comp. research essays) beside the hot tub at 6:30 a.m., I did not foresee the future quite as clearly as I now wish I would have. I flipped back the cover, breathed in the steam, set down my portable mug o’ coffee and slipped carefully into the soup. It never occurred to me that my man had generously—per my directions—refilled the tub while he was hosing off the back porch the previous weekend, and that the level of the water had risen considerably.

I know what you’re thinking. But it’s not true. I DIDN’T overflow the tub. No, I leaned back and sipped my java, listening for the meadowlarks to wake up,  watching the sparrows dip and chirp above the pond, following the clouds as they meandered across the sky.

And then a voice in swim trunks came through the steam…”Mind if I join you?”

Yes, my best friend and husband had risen to soak in the hot tub with me, in quiet reverence of the morning and my silent quest to grade. And without another word, he sent a wave of water--just shy of the Tsunami that wiped out the coast of Japan the previous week—over the side of the hot tub right into my briefcase.

One-hundred and twenty papers…and average of seven pages …approximately 400 words per double-spaced page…I think it works out—if my math is close, which is always a variable in the equation—to approximately 335,000 words…UNDER……..WATER.

I spent the morning arranging them, and re-arranging them before the fireplace, praying for them to stop curling like milk in lemon juice and that the words would remain legible enough to read. And just as I reached the point of ultimate despair………..and for those of you who teach, you know what I mean………….the point where you realize you will have to admit to your students just how really stupid you really are……………..I heard the voice of Norman Mclean.

You know it. It’s from a River Runs Through it. And for those of you who haven’t read it, perhaps you’ve seen it, as narrated by Robert Redford (who has the voice of an archangel, I’m pretty sure). It’s the voice of my father, the fisherman, and his father and grandfather who fished before him. It’s the voice that pulls me home to my White River every summer, and the voice that makes me take my shoes and socks off by a stream. It’s the voice hovering over the face of the waters from the beginning of time. It’s the voice from the womb that draws me to water and words.

No wonder I grade papers in the hot tub. No wonder I read in the bath. It’s what I was created to do. Words and water simply go together. They just WERE…from the beginning. Mclean said it like poetry. It’s water and the words.

(Link) View more Robert Redford Sound Clips

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

P.S. Myriah, I’m so deeply sorry about your essay. I apologize from the bottom of my toppled pedestal. I’m just SO not perfect.