Erika S.

09/06/201309/06/2013 Erika S. outfits

end of summer

I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can say that I am ready for school to start — at least my classroom is. All my learning targets are up, my lessons planned for monday, my planning documents submitted to administration, and my walls are covered with marked areas for my three different classes. This year I’m teaching Living Environment, Urban Agriculture (farms and cooking) and then I have my Crew. That’s a total of 138 on my roster, an improvement over my 170 my first year teaching.

Today’s shirt is a new one from Anthro that is a little bit beachy, a little bit greek-ish and a tad bit french-ish. I like that it has pockets.

top: anthropologie (on sale now) – jeans: f21 – shoes: saltwater sandals

09/04/2013 Erika S. outfits

Joyful Learning

Some sociology PhD candidate should do a study on working in education and the use of buzz words. I swear there must be a correlation between the use (or over use) of buzz words and the administration ladder. The kicker is that every district has their own set of buzz words. I’m imagining with every new chancellor/superintendent, the buzz words change. In SF, the buzz words were data, accountability, informed instruction, and joyful learners. Today’s theme was joy. As in my joy Division shirt, joy in iced coffee, and joy in getting my classroom set up and ready for the first day of school. Also, joyful in the fact that my jeans were still white at the end of the day.

My two favorite things lately: A birthday lipstick from B’s mum, sent all the way from Perth & a mini-Darwin figurine from my co-teacher Pam. He’s the shit and the lipstick is bright and joyful.

glasses: warby parker – tshirt: a present from my bud grace, but can be found here – jeans: uniqlo – shoes: saltwater sandals – lipstick: australis

08/27/201308/27/2013 Erika S. fun stuffs, trips

The last hurrah Part 2: the road trip

On the way down and back from Savannah, Grace and I took our time on the ole I-95 and…

1) ate at Cracker Barrel 3 times. That place is so yummy and cheap — we gorged on mac n’ cheese and their biscuits. This is my excited face for good ‘ole country food.

down south1

down south3

sunnies: knockaround – tank: f21 – shorts: uniqlo – shoes: saltwater sandals – bag: h&m

2) stopped at the Wormsloe Plantation on the outskirts of Savannah, mainly to check out the long oak lined driveway and for a quick history lesson from the park ranger.

savannah 13

3) we went to Medieval Times!! A SF friend of mine, Sunny, is from Myrtle Beach, SC. So naturally I had to check it out on the way home. I emailed her for recomendations and she hooked us up with her friend who is a beer wench at Medieval Times. There was no way I could pass up an opportunity to be called m’lady. I freaking loved it, but I don’t think Grace shared my dorky excitement for knights and jousting. WE GOT CROWNS!! Sadly, our blue night “died” near the end after a battle with the black and white night. *tear*

up north 3

4) we stopped at so many gas stations I lost count. The best one by far had a Dunkin Doughnuts and a lion statue outside. Naturally, I just had to climb on it and strike a pose. I ended up with a slight burn from the hot steel. Oops!

up north 8

up north 9

08/26/2013 Erika S. outfits

Acceptable in the 80’s

I’ve got hugz for you if you were born in the 80’s, the 80’s. Yeah.

I’m back! Or rather, my classroom’s back! Today was the first day of planning week at my school. The big guns start coming in on September 9th, so we’re spending the next few days looking at curriculum maps and STAs (standard-learning target-assessments). My brain is turning on again. I decided to bust out my 80’s shirt today – a F21 knock off of the various jersey type t-shirts worn by my fashion idol jayne min here and here. Granted, I’m a year late on this trend, but…whateves. It’s not quite my year (spot on ’80!), but it’s close enough.

glasses: warby parker (my third pair!) – tshirt: f21 – skirt: super old banana republic – shoes: worishofer

08/25/2013 Erika S. fun stuffs, outfits, trips

The last hurrah, part 1: Savannah

Summer here in Brooklyn is on its way out. Relatively cooler temps have taken over and I report back to school tomorrow for a planning week, then the first day of students is on September 9th. It’s just about time to put the teacher hat back on along with the fall/winter layers. I think I’m ready for the school year… at least until the “start of school anxiety” sets in and I start getting nightmares and/or insomnia.

As a last hurrah, my friend (and fellow teacher) Grace and I decided to take a road trip down south. I’ve always wanted to check out the south, specifically Savannah, Georgia. I have this crazy romanticized image of Savannah, thanks to movies like Gone with The Wind and uh, *cough* Forces of Nature. I’m drawn to the south, with its lushness, the incredible and controversial history, the drawl (swoon) and most of all, the food (here’s some butter, y’all). Next on my list is a visit to Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. For our trip, Grace and I took 2 days getting down to Savannah and two days getting back. We only spent one full day in Georgia, but it was just about enough time considering how small Savannah really is. The night we got in, there was a blue moon. Grace and I stayed at the 17hundred90 Inn, which is rumored to be haunted and a block away from a historic cemetery. We didn’t experience anything creepy, but after hearing all those ghost stories I did wake up in the middle of the night super freaked out and scared to even peek out from the covers. Grace laughed at me the next day, but I was seriously scared (of nothing)!

The next day, Grace and I walked all over the historic district and then made our way over to the family style soul food restaurant Ms. Wilke’s. The wait in line was well worth it and we gorged on all things fried, stewed and covered in cheese. We walked it all off though, through Forsyth Park and all the other little squares in the area. I really wanted to collect some spanish moss to bring home, but our haunted pub crawl guide Brittany told us the moss was full of chiggers.

Grace was nice enough to help me snap some photos of my new-ish dress, which was perfect for the hot and humid Savannah weather. This dress is as close as I’ll ever get to the ridiculous mullet trend that just needs to die. Proper in the front, party in the back! My new birthday shades from B were a perfect match.

sunnies: knockaround – dress: anthropologie (on sale now!) – bag: h&m – shoes: madewell

08/16/2013 Erika S. fun stuffs, seriousness, teaching

Code Academy, a newbie’s perspective

This summer and its idleness has been turning my unused brain into mush. With a good amount of prodding from B, I’ve decided to revisit my olden days of “coding” by learning some front end development. Mostly just for fun now, with a long range plan of redesigning this blog on my own, and possibly, maybe, perhaps some small side work for future summers. My experience with coding goes as far back as 1994/1995, where my freshman year computer class was introduced to the world wide web through Netscape. This naturally led to a desire to create my own page which documented all my favorite bands. I learned some HTML through viewing the source code of pages, coded a few iterations of personal sites and promptly stopped when it got really complicated with tables. A couple years later came sites like GeoCities, and my need to learn how to code just died. If I had known back then that this tinkering around with coding could branch out into an actual career, I probably would not have just given up so soon.

My background knowledge of HTML only gets as deep as links, images and background colors, so needless to say, I’m starting from the bottom. The internets to the rescue! B suggested three sites for me to check out: Codeacademy, Treehouse and CodeSchool. Code School requires a decent background on the fundamentals of HTML and CSS, so that’s coming later. I poked around Treehouse and Codeacademy, looking for a good fit for my non-existent skill level and learning style. After going through the first demo session of Treehouse and Codeacademy, I’ve decided to go with the freebee and more comprehensive Codeacadamy (CA).

A few things I love about CodeAcademy as a student of code with the mind of a teacher:

It’s free, and therefore I can ~~force~~ recommend that my students use it also. When you start from scratch, it makes sense to save here and shell out bigger bucks (possibly at Code School) for higher level coding.
CA starts you off with the basics. The real basics, from the very very bottom, as in “what are tags?” Treehouse on the other hand, claims to start with the basics, but jumbles CSS and HTML together from the get go, which was confusing.
CA leads their Web Fundamentals track with HTML only, getting you used to the skeleton of a page. After a bit of practice, it eases you into incorporating some CSS inline with the HTML, before guiding you into separate HTML and CSS files. My student brain needs that type of delineation between HTML and CSS in order to fully understand how the two interact with each other. It also helps with a more overarching understanding of why CSS exists in the first place.
CA’s “teaching style” is practice and learn through both repetition and applied skills. It works well with both my old school “memorize and regurgitate” brain and my new school “show me what you have learned by applying it in a different way” brain.
Positive reinforcement! I’m not such a sucker for badges and the like. But I do value positive reinforcement, no matter how cheesy I find it. It ads a bit of cutesy and competition that I know the kids would like. I have a bunch!

A few things I feel like CA was missing as a newbie coder who needed B (web developer) to help fill in the blanks:

There was never any real explanation for coding syntax and the reasoning behind it. Why is it “font-family” and not “font family”? Why is it a “{” in CSS but a “<” in HTML? I felt the need to ask these questions so that I could move away from just memorizing to applying, ie: when spaces are allowed and when you need hyphens. CA goes into a bit of syntax reasoning with the use of a “;” to separate properties.
The individual lessons were too small for my taste. I wanted larger chunks to learn. CA walks you through one tag at a time, which can get a bit tedious ~~I’m such a fast learner I blow by them~~ as my brain needs larger projects with multiple tasks to fully grasp the bigger picture. With CA, you learn headers, then paragraphs, then lists, then tables, etc all as bite sized lessons. Why not learn more at once and use more at once?
I need my vocab to be front loaded (little known fact: I was classified as an ELL until 4th grade) and CA academy does not touch on vocab development. I kept calling things like “background-color” style elements until B corrected me to “properties”. A bit of vocab can help, so that I at least have the right words to use when I’m stuck and looking for help. I already forgot – what’s an “attribute”? So far I’ve gotten one little bit of vocab in CA:
no videos – not something I mind, really. But I can see how some people would be drawn to Treehouse’s snazzy tutorials.
There wasn’t much said about code formatting and code editor use. Little did I know, this question led to a complete TMI explanation from B about tabs vs 4 spaces and nesting and aligning coding practices.

School is starting in a couple short weeks, so here’s hoping I find the time to keep this up during the school year. It would be pretty darn awesome to be able to teach a web design class of some sort in the future. I’ve only been at this for a few days here and there so far — I’m about 60% of the way through CA’s “Web Fundamentals” pathway. I’m still far from embodying my favorite 90’s move character:

08/13/2013 Erika S. fun stuffs, trips

Pura Vida – A bit more from our trip

It’s been weeks since we got back, but I’m just now getting through the photos from B’s camera. So a few more bits:

1) Vulcan Arenal — We took the usual touristy “Lava Flow Hike” through the rainforest and saw a lot of rocks. We ended that hike with a seriously luxurious honey-moon like soak at the Tabacon Hot Springs (no pictures, we were busy being amazed by the pools)

Vulcan Arenal Hike

2) Monteverde — B and I took the Jeep-Boat-Jeep transport (no actual Jeeps) from La Fortuna to Monteverde. The transport itself was ok, but we got stuck with a family of 13 from San Diego who were jaw dropingly annoying, horrible and ridiculous. They were those types of travelers who packed 2 large suitcases each (you really only need a backpack), are loud, obnoxious and treated the drivers like crap, and worst of all, threw things and yelled at the sloth we saw in a tree to try and get it to move. I wanted to throttle them. B and I shared a coconut and tried to ignore them for most part.

The cloud forest was pretty awesome – it made me feel like I was in a San Francisco park (Mt. Sutro open space reserve or Mt. Davidson) with all the fog. In the town of Monteverde, we also wasted some time and money taking a coffee and chocolate tour.

3) Playa Samara — A gorgeous quaint beach town and completely worth it. B and I stayed there for 4 days, 2 days too long. We got bored and we got burned. We went surfing one day (I’m ready for bigger waves and a smaller board!) and the snorkeling the next. The last two days we just sat on the beach and read (and were bored). We saw iguanas munching away in trees, ate at an expensive but seriously good steak house, and followed one of the three wild horses on the beach.

4) San Jose — We spent our last night in San Jose which was a huge, huge mistake. We were nervous about getting to the airport in time if we left from Playa Samara, so we decided to check out the capital city before we left. We had a horrible experience at the hostel we were at (Hostel Pangea – do not recommend), and the most expensive ($80!) but completely inedible meal at La Estancia Argentina. Our one day in San Jose completely soured the end of our otherwise great trip. Boo.

08/07/2013 Erika S. teaching

Link Love: An Open Letter to New Teachers

I wish someone had sent me this letter my first year of teaching, it would have saved me from a number of freak out moments.

My first year started out with a bang – With in the month, I had been sworn at, called a number of names, been yelled at by angry scary parents, got things thrown at me, broken up a fight and basically was emotionally torn apart, ready to quit. I was back at my alma mater with my very own classroom. In the days leading up to meeting students for the first time, all the other teachers were abuzz with huge to do lists to prepare their rooms. I had two things on my to-do list: get dry erase markers and set up my desks in rows. I was naive to just about everything I was getting into. I was an intern teacher with one semester of fumbling through teaching a small ELD class to kids who were quiet little mice under my belt. Intern-teacher, meaning I was about to start my credentialing courses in a month — no theory, no experience, clueless as to what it means to be a teacher, idealistic as all hell and daydreaming about how much fun it would be to teach science. I had never heard of “scaffolding”, “differentiating” or what a lesson plan looked like. I had no curriculum, no unit plans, nothing stolen from other teachers, no plan for classroom management.

What the hell was I thinking? I wasn’t — I didn’t know what I needed to think about. A letter like this would have clued me in a bit.

Some of the best advice/tips I got my first year of teaching was mostly about housekeeping: how to manage attendance, how to set up a system to distribute papers, etc. Some of the worst/most useless bits of advice were on classroom management. I couldn’t actually teach anything at all, behavior was such a mess. The advice I got was…”just show them who’s boss, you have to own the classroom”

An Open Letter to New Teachers.

07/31/201307/31/2013 Erika S. fun stuffs, trips

The first half of summer…the best bits

I woke up this morning (as in… noon. It’s SUMMER and I can sleep in like a sloth if I want) to a string of notifications from WordPress about new followers – 5 new readers! It’s summer (as if we all need a reminder) so I’ve been seriously lazying it up these past couple of weeks. My lack of productivity is getting to the point of embarrassment, so I figured I needed to kick myself in the butt to start getting some things done. Only fun stuff though, I haven’t hit boredom rock bottom quite yet. First up, a revisit to the world of blogging: to get my brain somewhat moving again and to spew my life out onto the interwebs. Next up, a short backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail, a road trip to Savannah with fellow teacher Grace and learning a bit of code with help from CodeAcadamy/Treehouse/Codeschool and B. By the time that’s all done, it will be time to put my sloth-ish tendencies on the back burner and gear up for the new school year (and back to teacher outfits).

As proof that teachers do indeed have lives outside of the classroom (and for some internal validation that I haven’t completely disappeared into the couch with the Game of Thrones books), here are a few highlights of the summer thus far.

1) A pair of Aussie visitors, aka B’s mom (also a teacher!) and Peter! They came all the way out to Brooklyn just to hang with us for a week. They were fresh off a vintage Bentley car rally through the west coast and Montana (for real) and flew over to the east coast on their way back home to Perth. We took them on a modified tour of NYC (they’ve seen it all before) and spent a lot of time just chatting it up. I loved them and it was especially cool to hear B’s mom talk about teaching in Perth. B had the job of deflecting all comments/hints about marriage or grandchildren.

highline park

9:11 memorial

2) The real vacation, aka Costa Rica – B and I shelled out the big bucks for a trip to Costa Rica. 11 days, three towns and a lot of advice from Lonley Planet took us hiking, white water rafting, surfing, ziplining and left us with sunburns. Totally worth it, even with the sting of the high prices.