My Love Affair with Chobani Yogurt!

Yogurt is often a staple for healthy eating. But up until approximately 6 weeks ago, I would have said that I loathe yogurt and didn't understand everyone's fascination with it. I had tried every brand over the past 30 years or so - Yoplait, Dannon, La Yogurt, Activia, Stonyfield Farms, etc. - and my feelings about them can be summed up with: "Yuck, yuck, yuck!"  That is until I was introduced to Chobani Greek yogurt! OMG! Pure heaven in a plastic container. While in Boston for TFA Induction, one of my suitemates introduced me to Chobani and it's been a love affair ever since. In fact, I would supplement my nasty sandwich lunch by adding a container of Chobani while in Philadelphia. So satisfying.

According to all the nutritional "experts," Greek yogurt is by far the healthier choice over and above regular yogurt.  In a head to head contest, low- or fat-free Greek yogurt has about the same amount of calories, but has more protein, lower carbs and less sugar than the regular low- or fat-free yogurt. I found this article to be a great read about the differences between the two.  Added to all of this, I think Greek yogurt just tastes better!  While I'm sure it's better to buy the plain Greek yogurt and add your own fruit, I'm way to lazy for that. Chobani has 21 flavors available! Here are my favorites: Strawberry-Banana, Pineapple, Vanilla, Peach, Apple Cinnamon, Raspberry, and Black Cherry. I will say I didn't like the Lemon or the Blood Orange.  Both flavors had a weird aftertaste. The Blueberry was just okay. I have not yet tried the Strawberry, Passion Fruit, Mango, Pomegranate or Honey flavored, but I plan on trying them soon.  They also have a kids-friendly line that I'm dying to try. What's better than Orange-Vanilla or Honey-Nana?!  Honey and banana!!!  Yum!!!

Some people prefer the Fage brand over Chobani but I have not yet tried Fage. Perhaps I'll try that next.

So if you have never liked yogurt, I suggest getting yourself a container of Chobani and trying it.  BTW, none of this applies to frozen yogurt. That has always been delicious. Check out George Carlin's take on yogurt.  Oh, George, I miss you!  [Note: I have not been paid by Chobani for this review.  But if anyone at Chobani would like to...]

Career Change: Home Sweet Home!

After 5.5 weeks (40+ days, 967 hours, 58,055 minutes, 3,483,300 seconds - give or take), I finally arrived home last night. But there's not much time to relax. Right now, I don't have a fall placement and quite frankly I'm not trusting that TFA will be able to get me a fall placement in the content area for which I'm licensed. Despite my repeatedly telling them that I don't feel like I have enough training in order to teach ELL students and that I'm not licensed in ESL, they continue to mention that there's a good chance that I'll be teaching ESL in the fall. <sigh>  Seriously, I'm getting fed up with TFA who apparently is not interested in keeping their corps members happy and instead are focusing on their own agenda.  Because of this issue, I'm starting to apply for my own English/Language Arts positions - in addition to hoping that TFA will finally wake up and find me ELA positions to interview for. Not having a placement is a little unnerving but I'm dealing. 

The rest of this week, I'm pretty much left to my own devices with not much work to do, which will allow me to enjoy Newburyport's Yankee Homecoming and watch the Olympics. Starting next week, TFA has arranged for the corps members to continue with some additional professional development over the following two weeks before the various school districts' new teacher orientation begins. Additionally, I will do my own studying by spending the next few days devouring Harry Wong's The First Days of School and Fred Jones' Tools for Teaching, which most teachers consider the must reads for every teacher - old and new. I know teachers who have been teaching for dozens of years who still reread both books every year before the school year starts.

On the personal side, my beautiful kitty made it through like a trouper the nearly 6 weeks of her mom being away. She has spent most of last night and today laying on mom's lap demanding attention, although she occasionally nips at me which is how she shows her displeasure over my leaving her alone for as long as I did. That being said, I'm unbelievably happy to be home. 

Alzheimer's is Horrendous!

The title of this blog is not a surprise to anyone.  Alzheimer's is a dreadful, dreadful disease!

Yesterday, I made a trip that I have been dreading for 5 weeks - a visit to see my mother. Let me preface this by saying that I haven't visited my mother in over 5 years. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease approximately 6 years ago and I found it extremely difficult to visit her for a myriad of reasons that I won't get into. Since her diagnosis, my mother's been in a long-term care facility in Cherry Hill, NJ, which is right across the river from Philadelphia. Guilt finally got the better of me and I made the trek to Cherry Hill with my brother to see her. What a nightmare! We were there a total of maybe 45 minutes and I walked out feeling bruised, battered and severely grieved. Tragically, I barely recognized my own mother and, even sadder, I never want to visit again.  I know this makes me a terrible daughter, but I really cannot handle these visits. This is a disease that I wouldn't wish on my worse enemy ... well, maybe I would my WORSE enemy, but otherwise, I wouldn't wish this on anyone else.

Knowing that Alzheimer's is quite possibly a hereditary disease scares the living crap out of me. I do not want to end up looking like the shell of the person that I saw yesterday.  For all my mother's faults (and believe me there were many of them), I hate to see her afflicted with this ruthless disease. How do I try to not end up like her? My plan is to keep my mind active no matter what - keep taking classes and learning, keep working, keep doing whatever I need to do to keep my brain active. Because this is a disease which sucks the life out of everybody - the person with the disease has no quality of life and their loved ones, who have to watch the disease, suffer monetarily, emotionally and physically.  All in all, it's not a good way to spend your remaining years. My hope for you, dear readers, is that you will never ever have to deal with this dreadful disease.  If you want to learn more, check out the Alzheimer's Awareness website. 

Career Change: Summer Institute (Week 5)

I can say it now - the party's over!  And none too soon. I think if summer institute didn't end this week, someone was going to go postal. Not necessarily me, but someone. By this week, nearly everyone said "enough is enough!"  Even though there were still one or two Kool-Aid drinkers in the mix, everyone else was cooked.

Even my students had had enough. Their behavior this week has been out of control.  On Monday afternoon, the dean of students, the principal and the head of security held my class for 30 minutes after the end of the school day to have a long discussion about the class's behavior - how they weren't meeting the school's expectations at all. It came to a head on Monday morning when one of my students (normally a quiet, respectful boy) decided to practically overturn his desk and curse out another student during my class and I had to throw him out of the class, because calling someone a "mother eff-er" is not acceptable behavior...in any classroom.  They were slightly better on Tuesday but by Wednesday, they had returned to their beastly ways.  The only decent behavioral day was Thursday due to them taking their final exam for nearly 2 hours and even then I still had to put one kid in detention. All things considered, I love my students and I will miss them, but I am glad to be leaving them here and heading home. There is one student, Richard, whom I would love to carbon copy and take home with me.  He's that one of a kind student who is mostly on task, rarely goofs off, is smart, funny and adorable, and is eager to learn.  (See the photo?  So sweet!) 

As bad as my students were this week, nothing compares to how horrible the TFA sessions were.  I never want to hear the words "let's reflect on..." ever again!  I'm pretty much done with "reflecting" on anything.  Seriously, this place got more and more cult-like over the last couple of weeks and very few corps members at my school were actually on board with this.  So of course, we all sat together, making snide comments to each other. All I can say is that I'm glad that summer institute is over and by tomorrow night, I will be home, annoying my cat and watching 5 weeks of saved Hell's Kitchen episodes.  Huzzah for snarky Chef Gordon Ramsay.

So to summer institute I say the following:  Farewell, dorm room with the uncomfortable twin bed, which squeaks horribly and wakes me up nightly. It's like sleeping on a crouton. Ciao, dining hall which I have a feeling will continue cause me intestinal issues for the next week or so. Toodles, shower stall that has something growing in the corner which frightens the hell out of me. Buh-bye, soggy PB&J sandwiches on over-sized white bread that was my daily lunch. Auf Wiedersehen, yellow school bus that is not air conditioned in 93 degree humid weather. Good riddance, annoying co-teacher who is a shallow, insincere git and probably won't last long in this profession! I will not miss any of you.

There are 2 things that I will miss from this time in hell - (i) my corps member adviser, George, who was the only person who completely understood my frustrations and annoyances with TFA and kept me focused on the importance of what I was doing with my kids, and (ii) the only decent thing to eat in the dining hall - the cookies, which explains the five pounds that I gained!

On another note, it appears my placement at SeaCoast High School is in jeopardy. I finally got an answer from the TFA placement office on what happens if (more likely, when) I fail the ESL MTEL. Apparently they ask the school district to get a waiver which will allow the unlicensed teacher to teach for a year while studying and taking the test again. (A really bad idea in my humble opinion. Particularly with a specialty subject like ELL, you really need to have someone licensed who is knowledgeable in the subject.)  So the placement office put in a request to the Revere school district on my behalf for a waiver and this was the email I received from the placement director: "I spoke with Revere today and it seems unlikely that they will be able to request a waiver at this point for the position.  I'll have a definite answer on Monday." So now it's back to square one on finding a position. I have mixed feelings about this. To put it mildly, I wasn't thrilled about teaching ELL students because I feel unqualified but I liked the school, the principal and the location.  <sigh>  Oh, well.  Not much I can do about that now. The perfect position is just waiting for me somewhere! I just have to have patience.

Career Change: The Last Day of School

Today was the last day with my summer school kids and I wanted to share something that happened today which made this whole summer worthwhile. If you remember I had an issue with a student (Raheem) 10 days ago when he wrote about his brother who had been killed last year.  Well today, something similar happened in my classroom but to a much better conclusion.  First, a little background:

On July 24, in Philadelphia, two teenage boys (ages 17 and 13) were killed in a drug deal gone bad. Read the entire story here.  A few students in my class knew these boys.  Today, I tried another writing assignment which I thought would be fun for my kids.  I had them all write the first line of a story and then pass their paper to the boy who sits behind them who then added the next line to the story and then passed it along to the next student and on and on.  I got lots of stories about how great basketball is.  But here’s what five of my wonderful boys came up with [I’ve fixed their grammatical and spelling errors]:

“It has saddened many people to hear that two teenage boys were shot and killed in their house.  These two teenage boys did nothing wrong to anyone to get shot in their own home.  The teenagers’ death saddened hundreds.  I was friends with both teenage boys and it was upsetting to hear that my friends died in my area.  I knew Rohan from my cousin, we were real close and when I heard the news, it was devastating and I hope they find their killer.  RIP Rohan & Chris.”  (See the photo)

What was the most amazing thing about this story is that it was Raheem who started the story in the first place. The fact that all these boys, especially Raheem, felt safe enough and supportive enough to write this story in my class and allow me to read the story aloud to the entire class was probably the most moving and amazing moment of my summer.  I managed to keep it together emotionally in front of my students but a couple hours later when I tried to tell this same story to my CMA group, I completely lost it and needed George, my amazing adviser, to read the story for me.  It means so much to me that these boys trusted me and their fellow students enough to share this story. This piece of paper is going in my scrapbook!

This was the first day I felt like an educator!  I also used the story to discuss themes and morals of stories and they unanimously came up with the moral of the story – Don’t have anything to do with drugs!  Such bright boys!  Unfortunately, I still had to put three of my students in detention for behavior issues.  Oh well, no day is perfect. 

Check back tomorrow morning for Summer Institute (Week 5) post.

Not so 'Awesome'

Okay, the grammar Nazi has another complaint.  This time it is with the word "Awesome," which is arguably one of the most overused adjectives in the English language.  Today, as of noon I heard the word used over 100 times - then I got tired of counting. Now I fully admit to being guilty of this overusage. (I used it 8 times myself when I was counting.)  Therefore, I am not advocating the stoppage of using this word.  After all, it can be the best word choice in certain circumstances, but I think we need to start limiting the usage.  There are so many more word choices out there.  Here's a brief and not complete exhaustive list of alternative words (courtesy of dictionary.com):

alarming, amazing, astonishing, awe-inspiring, awful, beautiful, breathtaking, daunting, dreadful, exalted, fearful, fearsome, formidable, frantic, frightening, grand, hairy, horrible, horrifying, imposing, impressive, intimidating, magnificent, majestic, mean, mind-blowing, moving, nervous, overwhelming, real gone, shocking, something else, striking, stunning, stupefying, terrible, terrifying, wonderful, wondrous, zero cool.

Personally, I find 'hairy' the most interesting!  And while not all of these words are completely exchangable with the word awesome, many are.  So let's start changing up our vocab and try using some new descriptors.  Wouldn't that be just awesome?! 

Friends I Can't Wait to Meet!

Best Shakespearean
actor of our time!

In scrambling for a blog topic, I went back to Chris Brogan's 100 Blog Topics I Hope YOU Write posting that I used to come up with my 10 Guilty Pleasures blog and found "Friends I Can't Wait to Meet!"  That got my creative juices flowing.  There is a list of people that I swear if we had a chance to meet, we would be BFFs!  Sadly, these people aren't aware of my existence.

Here's a short list of a much longer list of must meet "friends" - in no particularly order:

1. Kenneth Branagh
2. Hugh Jackman
3. Emma Thompson
4. Kevin Kline
5. Nathan Lane
6. Jon Stewart
7. Hugh Laurie
8. Ralph Fiennes
9. Bill and Hillary Clinton
10. Elton John

I'm just putting the following message out there: if anyone knows any of the people on my list and would like to introduce us, that would be fantastic!!  Otherwise, I'll just wait for fate to intervene!