It's been a while, I've seen a lot more of Texas life, and enjoyed most of it immensely. Here are a few Texas tidbits for my anxious readers.
I was an Aggie for Halloween. If you don't know what that is, it's a person who went to Texas A&M University. So I wore a class ring and cowboy boots and a jean skirt and a shirt that said "You may all go to hell, but I will go to Texas" and I had big hair. I may have offended some people since most people I know went to aTm.
The past week we have been studying the Holocaust in my 5th grade class. You know, when you need to teach your class how to spell a word and write it on the board lots of times, you learn how to spell it. Holocaust and Renaissance, two words I finally know how to spell. Anyway, we are reading Number the Stars, which is a wonderful book, and we were talking about how Denmark didn't fight back against the Nazis but allowed them to take over in return for political independence. One student raised his hand and said, "But didn't they have an army?" and I said, "Yes, but a small one, not big enough to win against the Nazis." And then one kid randomly calls out, "Yeah, but they couldn't beat TEXAS."
Teaching about the Holocaust has given me a really big sadness and horror about the state of the world, but at the same time, teaching Number the Stars has been wonderful. It's estimated that there were 7,300 Jews living in Denmark at the beginning of WWII. All but 300 of them were able to escape through fishing boats to Sweden and it's estimated only 50 Danish Jews died in the Holocaust. It's such a beautiful story of courage and what people can do, but it makes me really sad to think of what we didn't do at the same time. Hand in hand with teaching the Holocaust I'm teaching about Japanese Interment camps in the U.S. and in Social Studies the kids are studying colonists and Native Americans. Poor kids--that's a lot to take all at once. To go along with teaching the Holocaust, we read the allegory Terrible Things by Eve Bunting. I'd highly recommend it if you are ever trying to get a child to understand what can happen if we don't stick up for what's right.
On a lighter note, I like Lonestar beer now. Who would have guessed.
I'm enjoying 70 degree sunny weather every day in November, new girl friends, biking around the city to church and along the Bayou, having beautiful symphony music at my fingertips, and finding new places to dance and speak Spanish. Life is normalizing a little more, but I'm still missing Chicago and Maryland. Why is it that life ends up so spread out?
