Martin Luther King Day

Kristy and I went to see The Great Debaters today, for Martin Luther King day--it's really powerful, I recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

Also, Barack Obama delivered an AMAZING sermon at Dr. King's old church yesterday, in honor of Dr. King's birthday. Whatever anyone thinks of his politics, I hope there isn't anyone in the US today that doubts the power of Obama's rhetoric, or his speaking abilities. I have never heard another living politician that has the sincerity to truly to be inspiring the way he is. This man makes me proud to be an American.

Check out the text or video of the speech here.

Weekend of Cross-Cultural Awesomeness

This weekend has been uber-cool--Friday night Kristy and I went with some friends to a Balkan dance night thingie up in Inwood (the northern tip o' Manhattan), with some really awesome local NYC traditional Balkan bands. It got me all excited for the exotic music possibilities o' New York that I haven't been paying too much attention to due to my job sucking in most of my time--apparently one of the bands that played Friday has a funk-infused alter ego called "Balkan Soul Party" that plays down in Brooklyn every few weeks. "Balkan Soul Party"? That sounds like Czech for PURE AWESOME.

Saturday we went to a really cool exhibit at the Jewish Museum on the art of William Steig, who was with the New Yorker for forever and also did some really awesome childrens' books, like Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Shrek!, Doctor De Soto and the like. It was really cool to see his sketches, and get a better feel for his books, some of which I've got in my classroom. Ever since the beginning of the school year, I've started to fall more and more in love again with children's books. I can't wait to have some chilluns to share them with.

Bodily fluids and you

I have learned the hard way that one should always believe a child when they say they are feeling sick to their stomach—even if in every other circumstance they tend to try to exaggerate or lie to get out of work. Because that kid, THIS time, might actually BE sick to his stomach. My classroom floor can testify to the reality of this hard, sticky, something-with-beef-in-it truth.

The janitor side of Mr. Straubhaar-the-4th-grade-teacher cannot wait for Martin Luther King day.

Back from the E-Dead

So, despite all my best and naïve intentions during the summer to share all of my experiences with Teach For America via blog, I soon discovered a few weeks into Teach For America training that my life was soon to be sucked into oblivion. And thus it was. A very satisfying, chance-to-help-others, good-karma type of oblivion, but still. Especially during those first few weeks, it was hard enough to find enough time for five hours of sleep a night, much less blogging. And though in the time since then I've finished training, gotten halfway through my first year as a 4^th grade teacher in Washington Heights, prepared my kids for and led my kids through one of their big annual standardized tests (the English Language Arts one) and started preparing them for their second (the math one), and improved significantly as a teacher (through the throw-you-in-a-classroom-and-pray training method), it still took me a long time to even want to think about restarting a blog.

Not to mention the other amazing happening in the life o' Rolf, which most of you folks that read this should most surely know about—I got married to the most amazing person on earth, Kristy Money, an astoundingly loving, empathetic and caring woman, who for some reason said yes to me. She's the product of two academics as well, and has moved around a lot—she's currently a doctoral candidate in psychology from BYU. And did I mention she's the most amazing woman alive?

So yes. Time management over the last six months has not yielded much blogginess. But in the spirit of new beginnings (more so in terms of new beginnings as a married person than new beginnings with a new year—I never was much of a New Years' resolutions type), I am determined to try to remedy that.

Today I missed a couple of my favorite kids, who were absent today—especially Jaabar. Jaabar is about four feet tall, walks a kinda crooked line because he doesn't have very good balance, and is the most hilarious and mature 4^th grader you've ever seen. He's the kind of kid who forgets to bring his lunchbox home almost every day, yet has the most insightful questions of all when we're reading a book together. His handwriting is atrocious, but the ideas in his essays are the most complex in the class. And he's about the most endearing little duder ever. We give each other high fives a lot.

Kristy and I are ensconced in our New York apartment for a quiet evening in this Monday—we tend to have lots of those. Mainly because we don't have anything we'd rather do than be with each other. Married life is AWESOME.