Summer School

Summer School:
Biology
Edison High, Inner City Philadelphia

1. Noel pinky-sweared me he start coming to class on time. He's kept his promise.
2. Yanina realized shes smart. Shes been acing her assignments ever since.
3. Zuliema decided she wants to pass biology this summer. She's stopped sleeping and wants extra tutoring.
4. Hector and Luis gave me their emails so they could make up the extra work they missed when they were absent. Out of their own volition.
5. Alexia realized shes good at biology and has been on time every day since.
6. Erica was worried about failing again. She has a 93% in our class.

Despite some of the horrible lessons I've given, the hours I haven't slept, and the long road ahead before I can actually call myself a good teacher - these are some of the victories.

I love these kids more than life.

Reason 21 Why I Love My Major

God's Grandeur

- Gerard Manley Hopkins THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. Black Sand Beach - Kaikoura, New Zealand

Spring

is starting to peek through.
winter ash skies leak light
anxious buds crack open (if only a hair)
and the first brave flowers creep up from frosty soil.

subtle hints,
but soon
Ohio just won't be able to contain herself.

meet hint one.
Ohio's first Spring Wildflower
the most dauntless of them all

Symplocarpus foetidus
aka Skunk Cabbage.

This strangely beautiful, albeit smelly, flower is the first to usher in Spring each year.
It blooms mid February - warming its flowers by producing and trapping heat within its hooded spadix.
And sitting snug, cozy in their enveloped fairy colonies, these flowers experience renewal long before the frog thaws and emerges from mud soaked sleep, before the pussy willow opens its first velvet bud, before the first underfur is loosed from the foxes coat.
Alone and content, they'll patiently wait for their neighbors to arise, and join them in greeting the equinox sun.