i have a dream

on august 28, 1963, dr. martin luther king gave his famous sixteen minutes and twenty-eight second speech on the steps of the lincoln memorial. it was forty years before my first year teaching.

that year, i saw the students self-segregating, as was the case with the community it seemed. long bred hatreds and distrusts has unconsciously worked their way into a younger generation. a pocket of white girls over here, a pocket of black girls over here, a handful of colorblind students starting to break the trend. as the years passed, most of them became colorblind, at least in choosing their friends. i was able to have serious discussions about race relations and history with them. i was often surprised by the poignant responses i got out of the blue with students that made painfully personal connections to the troubles of the jim crow south.

this year, with older students, the poignant thoughts continue. i asked my students to expand upon and revise dr. king's dream today. it's been nearly 46 years since his speech. much has been done, but i see the hope in the younger generation to continue to live out dr. king's words. the common thread running through their speeches were attitudes of peace, acceptance, tolerance, love, and kindness. the broad palette of my students makes me ever hopeful that the progress will continue.

yawn!

as usual, an entertaining evening in the district was ruined by a long, silver train. when i go into the city in the daytime, i never have problems with missed trains or long delays between them. the later it gets in the evening, the longer the waits become and the more asinine metro's policies become. last night, waiting for a transfer at metro center, two empty trains passed through the station without letting any of the 100+ people on the platform on. i know they're trying to stack up their trains at the line termini (plural of terminus?), but it seems awfully wasteful at the same time for them to not carry passengers when metro is still open! a trip that took us 30 minutes to get into the city, transfer included, stretched out to 75 minutes back out. c'mon metro!

because i didn't get home until 11:30, it's going to be a long day. i had a scarf on when i left my house...i think. somewhere in between picking up my bag and walking to my car, i lost it. how it fell off in less than 100 steps without me noticing, i'll never know. i sure hope it's not a harbinger of things to come today...

on another note, i had a good spot to watch the drag race last night. the queen that won the race would've given usain bolt a run for his money. and yes, the queen in question was wearing high heels. the post covered it, too, so my coworkers didn't think i was crazy when i described it.

this was last year's race. if you remember, i went and had a blast then also.


happy halloween, y'all!

a whirlwind tour of the district

yesterday, i partook in a scavenger hunt race under the guise of meeting some new people, doing something active, and seeing the city. the story line was that a spy was loose in the city; thankfully, the story line was limited to the task sheets we picked up at each checkpoint. it could've gotten quickly cheesy had we been chasing an actual spy. each checkpoint was a double dare kind of fun; there were mental challenges and physical challenges.

first, the team. just by careers, i think we had a broad cross section of d.c. let's see, we had the air force, army and marines represented. we had the defense and state departments represented. we had a government contracts employee for a big aerospace firm. we had three education representatives in varying degrees: summer camp counselor, teacher's assistant, and a teacher. hey, that's me! to add a bit of intrigue, one of our members was a tourist visiting her daughter from austria, who just happened to be one of the organizers. we ranged in age from 21 to 44, and were about evenly split by the sexes. so gung ho about the competition were we that we all ran up the down escalator at one metro station to beat another team to the street. what?! there were strollers and "escalumps" in the way on the right way!

second, the challenges. first hour consisted of mostly icebreaker activities. we had to talk to each other about our life stories, jobs and whatnot. we ran too far in one direction on the metro, only to show up late for checkpoint one at the supreme court. we did pretty well on the challenges there, easily remembering the specific facts about our teammates. we did a little better in the next hour, showing up on canadian soil third for some points with that. some trivia, sing the canadian national anthem, take a breather. this was clutch. we were all getting pretty tired at this point, especially the non-sneaker-wearing members. third hour, we took over. we completed almost all of the challenges and questions, beating the organizers to the next checkpoint at the white house. the final two hours were compressed into 90 minutes or so. that had us crisscrossing downtown and dashing up connecticut avenue, cutting hair and getting hassled by homeless people. we showed up at the endpoint well ahead of the other teams, completed nearly all of both lists, and were on our second round at the bar before they started trickling in.

at that point, we were likely in sixth place or so. our fearless leader for team boss was thrown into the irish jig competition...and summarily destroyed the competitors. who knew that ballet dancers could channel michael flatley and mary katherine gallagher at the same time? final tally had us in second place. six measly points out of winning. no matter, we still shared the same prizes that the winners got. too bad she and i can attend neither of them. i'm sure you'll hear about our consolation prize someday soon.