A month later...

Truly a teacher now.

Let me start at the beginning. Friday, we as the class of corps members at this particular high school in Houston, graduated to being teachers. We were given a small ceremony, where they really did play Pomp and Circumstance, call us forward and present us with “teacher name” tags—last name only. Then we were free for the weekend.

This freedom involves much resting and relaxing for the first time the whole week. What did I do? I was social until late at night. Friday afternoon, my regional corps had a social at a local outdoor bar. Yes, just about every social they have is at a bar of some sort. This one had live country music, though, so I don’t mind too much. After a while, I might be more able to convince people to get up and dance there. The not-so-cool part was driving a friend’s car home for her. I wasn’t thrilled with the thought of driving in big-city traffic. I admit, though, I did appreciate the power of a steering wheel in my own hands again.

A good portion of Saturday was spent in sweet slumber—and you never know how great that feels until you’ve been running the whole week on between 4 and 6 hours per night. Yes, I did work on lesson plans, etc. on Saturday. In fact that’s what awakened me rather abruptly: I had a meeting scheduled with my advisor and my co-teacher to review rough drafts of lesson plans. I met my co-teacher outside the advisor’s door. He didn’t answer our knocks. So I called him. I could hear the phone ringing through the door. Then it stopped. We heard the deadbolt slide into the lock. No other response. Yes, we woke him up. So this is what good teachers do on the weekend.

Saturday night: I got to be an Astros fan for a full professional baseball game. TfA got 200 free tickets for this game, and we all took the bus downtown together. I've heard they are not the most consistent team, but they showed up to play that night and made all their local fans proud. Yes, the Astros won. I got to see Craig Biggio make his 2,989th hit. Now that is old news--congrats to him on the big 3000. We were in literally the top rows of the stadium, but it was wonderful. GNO got rowdy and started our corps cheer—which no one outside of TfA would understand. We got some great looks from the locals.

The next morning, a truly dear friend from college drove half an hour across town to pick me up and give me a ride to church, half an hour back across town. It warmed my heart to be with friends on Father's Day, when I was missing my own family. I even got to join her family for lunch. They took me with them to Chili’s and let me celebrate with them. Being far from home, this was a welcome bit of family and familiarity in the midst of a hectic time.