Finding Innisfree

I think it is so funny that I'm taking this volleyball class. It brings back all these memories from high school. I started giggling when, on the first day, she made us run around the gym 3 times and then we did some stretching and drills. Wednesday was a lot of fun because we just got to play the whole class and my team kicked ass. She lined us up on a line and counted us off to divide us into teams. A bunch of people just went off to whatever team their friends were on and, even though the teams were supposed to be even, our team only had six people. Did you ever do something like that? (I know I did in middle school). Well, it worked out fine. In my Creative Drama class we are learning about how to teach drama to little kids. I went and saw a youth theater presentation of Sadako and the Thousand Cranes. Did you know that the story isn't super popular in Japan? It is such a common story here. Anyways, my attempts at folding paper cranes failed quite miserably, but I had a good time. I was invited by the SLS department's secretary and she brought along her two daughters. I've hung out with them a couple of times, but for some reason her daughters really confide in me. Both of them tell me things that are bothering them or they were wondering about and don't want to tell their mom. Obviously, they aren't anything too terrible or scandalous that I had to tell their mom about, but I think it is so weird that they trust me so much, even though I haven't spent that much time with them. Even my nieces won't just tell me all this stuff. But it is a nice feeling too.

So, my poetry class is trying my patience. Not only is the professor so inefficient (we've spent 48 minutes introducing ourselves one day and often nothing happens for the first 15 minutes) and does he try and run through 10-20 poems in one class period and he completely neglects any poets that either wrote after 1950, aren't White, or aren't Western, but there are a bunch of these stupid undergrads in the class (and they are all English majors). I used to think I was so patient and didn't let stupid people bother me much, but it is really difficult in this class. I think because there are so many. A bunch of stupid surfer dudes making random stupid comments. And then all these ditsy girls talking a lot, but saying nothing. BUT! There is this one girl in particular who is full of excuses, complaints, and doesn't know when to stop. She has sent emails to the whole class asking for reading assignments (cuz she didn't write them down) or accusing someone of stealing her iPod (which she later remembered she left in our professors office...surely she was there to complain and give more excuses). She even apologized later and then took it back because there are a lot of "sketchy" people on campus and someone stole her friend's phone the week and so really, she decides, it was okay to accuse us of stealing. And she IS blonde, but I don't know if that is the natural color or not. And she wears almost nothing to class and complains about how cold it is. And when she introduced herself on the second day (after coming in late) she said she didn't like poetry and wasn't really interested in the class, but just needed an English class around that time and it was the only one that fit. Ah! She would be enough on her own, but when added to all the others, it makes for a rough class.

Umm...I'm going to give a conference presentation next month at Hawaii TESOL annual conference and I got this job offer to work at Punahou and be an Assistant Director for the PUEO program which is very similar to the Summerbridge program. But more about this later. For now, I'll leave you with some words that I really liked from W.B. Yeats, thanks to my poetry class:

"And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow"
-from "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats

So where is your Innisfree?