Teacher Appreciation Week - Sarah Stacy

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week! And in honor of that, let’s give something back to those awesome teachers that we’ve all had. In an era of increasing negativity towards this profession, let’s take the time to honor those teachers who have influenced us – past or present, instructors or colleagues, whoever! Post something on your blog, then link to it below this post. Just for kicks and giggles, use your teacher’s name as your link! Then….go visit! Spread the love!


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I was lucky in so many ways with my college education and the job hunt that came at the end of that education. I ended up getting a job at a large (5A) public school in a suburb of Dallas, Texas. This particular district had a week-long new teacher program that was held partially at the district, but mostly on the grounds of your home school. And one of the first things that happened as a new teacher was that you were matched up with a mentor teacher. My mentor teacher was Ms. Stacy. Sarah was a tall blond with a quick smile a down-to-earth personality, and a slightly twisted sense of humor that I was instantly drawn to. She was only a few years older than I, and we had a lot in common.

Sarah was my rock during that first year of teaching. On the days when I questioned whether or not I had wasted the previous five years of school and on the days when I cried, Sarah was there to figuratively hold my hand and get me through….and that crying thing? Yeah, that happened a lot. I'm kind of high-maintenance.

She gave me ideas, taught me about the school culture, taught me how to use (and unjam) the copier, gave me a place to eat lunch, someone to bounce ideas off of, and a shoulder to lean on. She told me how to find (and keep) a good desk chair, steered me away from the negative nellies in our department, and gave me her cell phone number. Sarah is one of the most open and friendly people I have ever met, and for the two years she was at the school with me, she was one of the most consistently hard-working teachers I have ever worked with.

Sarah taught world history and an AP world history class for the first time that year, got engaged, married, and pregnant during those first two years, took care of me and 150 high-maintenance sophomores, and still maintained her poise and grace every single day. The district I am in now does not have a particularly good mentor program and I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for those teachers without someone like Sarah there to keep them from gouging their own eyes out and running screaming from the building.

Sarah and I have stayed friends, despite the fact that she was only at my school for two years, and while I have told her before how awesome I think she is, it never hurts to hear it more than once. She has just recently returned to teaching after a break to start a family, and is doing something totally different (elementary school computers), but I am sure she is knocking it out of the park once again.

So here’s to Sarah….the model mentor!

Book Reviews

I realized that I had not posted the last two book reviews from the class I took, so here they are:

Someone to Run With by David Grossman is a GREAT book. It is interesting, engaging, and just a fun read. It is a book about a girl, a boy, and a dog named Dinka in Israel (but it has nothing to do with Palestine at all). It is somewhat hard to explain the story line, but it is essentially the story of a girl named Tamar trying to rescue her brother from drug addiction and the boy named Assaf who tries to return her lost dog to her. When you start reading it, for the first half of the book you feel like you are only getting half of the story, which is true. But about halfway in, things start to fall into place and it becomes one of those books that you simply cannot put down. To put it another way, it is a book that my low-performing students would like so much they would be willing to read a "long" book (it's about 350 pages).

Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk is not a novel, like the other books I read for this class, but it is still interesting. It is the description of Istanbul by someone who lived there for pretty much his entire life and it is very good. He writes somewhat "stream of consciousness" so some people would find it hard to read, but I really liked his descriptions of the city

Scheherazade Goes West by Faterma Mernissi was recommended during this class, and I got the chance to read it this weekend. It is an absolutely fascinating look at the differences in the perception of women in the west and women in the east - but it's not what you might expect. Mernissi places a distinction between how women in the east are valued and women in the west. She points out that western men have an ideal women who is beautiful, silent, and not as smart as they are. Eastern men, on the other hand, idealize women who are intelligent and can match wits with them. She uses as an example the fact that harem women, who constantly compteted with each other for attention from the pasha, could only stand out from the rest and keep his attention if they were well-read and literate and able to mentally spar with him. She uses as an example of Scheherazade and the 1001 Nights, where the only way Scheherazade is able to stave off death, and in fact end the reign of terror instilled by the sultan's practice of marrying virgins and then killing them, was to tell 1001 consecutive stories, by which point the sultan has fallen in love with her mind, not her body. Mernissi says there is a difference between the way western men confine women (with time) and the way eastern men confine women (with space). For example, eastern women are expected to wear veils in public. "Public" is public space - which is how eastern men confine women. Western men have a certain expectation of how women are supposed to look (young and beautiful), which is how they confine women with time. If you aren't a certain age or look a certain way (usually tied to age), you are no longer good for anything. I took it a step further and thought that this might be why western women are drawn to eastern men - who traditionally (although possibly unconsciously) value the mind rather than the body. I highly recommend this book.

Gloom and Despair

I have become somewhat frustrated with this class I'm taking. I feel like the other people in the class with me are one of two things:

1. have such a higher level of education that they are talking about things that I can't even comprehend what's happening, meaning that we are actually talking about the books and I'm not aware of it

2. already know so much about literary style and Arabs that they are just asking questions about finer points of Arab thought and it is pointless for me to ask questions about the books because they already have it.

There is a third option, which I don't think is even remotely possible, that everyone else is as frustrated with it as I am. They all seem to take copious notes and look incredibly earnest at all times, and usually I am designing a new bag, thinking about what's for lunch, or drawing hand turkeys all over my notes.

We have a new addition to our class, a Moroccan professor who teaches at the same highly prestigious and unbelievably expensive school that my AP instructor does. I know this shows my apparent idiocy, but it never occurred to me that a Moroccan would be white. I know it's stupid, but it just never occurred to me. He is white (with light skin and hair), Muslim, and Moroccan. Of course, he speaks at least three languages fluently (French, English, and Arabic) and I am assuming he speake Farsi or something, because his doctoral thesis was on something having to do with India. He has a cool, not quite British, not quite French accent and is fun to listen to, except when he and the original professor make asides to each other in Arabic, at which point I subside into stupidity because I have no idea what they are saying.

The book we are discussing (Cities of Salt) is ok, but we didn't get that into it because we kept getting sidetracked by talk about women (who are nonexistent in the book) and the politically correct term for Berbers (Amazigh...also not present in the book, which is about the Persian Gulf). At this point, I am just hoping that some kind of lesson plan will inspire me, because at this point, I am supposed to have one by Friday and I am totally stuck and uninspired. I am just waiting it out, knowing that it will all be over on Friday. Yea!

Number 100

Post number 100....I'm pretty sure that's a sign I have too much to say. Someday I'll learn to shut up. But not today!!!! =)

So the class at UW is going fairly well. We have talked more about this second book, Palace Walk than we did about Leo Africanus and I feel like I understand it more, but we keep getting sidetracked onto random discussions and disagreements between one woman and the professor about the differences in Pakistani and Egyptian culture. Well, of course they're different, one is in Asia and one is in Africa, and possibly the only similarity they share is that they both happen to be mostly Islamic. And most Americans could tell you that not all Muslims agree about MOST things. So it all seems rather pointless. This same woman has the irritating habit of only saying half her sentence before starting on the next one or trailing off into nothingness. So I doodle a lot. I actually did math today...I figured out the equation to tell me how many sashing strips and squares I need to make any t-shirt blanket.

When we are on topic, I learn interesting things, like how Egypt and Britain handled the transition of power in the 1920s and 1930s, marriage and divorce traditions, inheritance procedures, and the private attitude of many Arab nations towards Palestinians. This last one was especially interesting. One of the major themes in Palace Walk is the attitude of the men about the women. See here for my take on it. The professor pointed out that this is an attitude that is somewhat apparent throughout all the novels we are reading and also is an attitude that is more or less apparent to Westerners as well. We talk a lot about giving freedom to Afghan women and how terribly the women in Iran are treated and so on. We are very concerned with the treatment of women in other places, especially places where women are treated differently than in the US.

It is true that women in most Muslim countries are generally treated very differently than women in any "western" nation. I would hesitate to use the word "cruel," at least not as a generalization, but that is the perception that we have about the treatment of women in places like Iran and Afghanistan. What is less clear to us is that those specific examples are somewhat extreme. In many places throughout the Arab (and Muslim) world (which, by the way, neither Iran or Afghanistan are considered Arab...by themselves or by others) women are looked on as people that need to be protected from the world. They are the outward manifestations of a man's character. They are his crown, his wealth, his status, and the reason that he is respected. This is a hard concept for us to grasp. Here, women are valuable in their own right and for their own reasons, which they work hard to attain. There, women are valuable because they make a man successful. It is through his children that a man gains worth, and a man cannot have children without a woman's presence in his home. His home is considered incomplete without a woman in it and it is through the women in his life that he gains prestige and respect in his community.

A woman without a man is someone to be taken care of, to be sheltered, to be protected. If a woman is not taken care of or if she chooses to live outside the traditional role of daughter or wife, then she is on her own. If she is not taken care of, it reflects shamefully on the husband or father who has abandoned her. If she chooses to live outside this role, then whatever happens to her is her own fault. So...how does this tie back to Palestine? Much like an Arab community would hate the actions of a rapist but blame the woman for being in a position to allow herself to be raped (she was outside the home, she was not with her husband, etc), the larger Arab community hates the actions that Israel did in conquering Palestine in 1948, but blames the Palestinians for allowing that action (the rape) to happen. Consequently, although there will always be talk from the larger Arab community about punishing Israel, it is very unlikely that anyone will ever do anything about it. Hence the reason that Palestinians have been in refugee camps for 60 years.

Anyway....I hope I don't horribly offend anyone by this, it was just a fascinating aspect that I had not considered about the likelihood of involvement in the Palestinian issue by other Arab nations.

By the way, I set the odometer (tachometer?) this morning before I left the house and it is 23 miles from my house to UW. I watch my gas level fall on every trip...**gulp**