Houston Institute Day One

Last night of Induction -- my suite mates
(and, um, that's just soda in the cups, cause we're about to be teachers...
so yeh that's just soda, see it behind us in the photo, that is proof!)

So I survived day one of induction. Yesterday, after a 6-hour drive, we arrived at the University of Houston and immediately were surrounded by these people who started pulling stuff out of my car and directing me where to drive, all timed by stopwatch. Then we go into a large ballroom with various tables for various items (keys, grant checks, books) all timed by stopwatch. They even timed how long it took between elevators to get people to their rooms. Wow. We had dinner. I set up my room. I'm sharing with a gal who was in my dorm suite in Edinburg, "Meeshy," who's from Ohio and very bubbly and fun. I think we'll make good roommates. (She's the blonde in the pic above that's next to me.)

Today was the first day of institute and I am wiped. I got up at 5:30am, dressed, went down to breakfast which was swarmed (there are about 700 new corps members here from Denver, Mississippi Delta, Hawaii, Houston, RGV, and South Dakota). So I barely had time to eat breakfast by the time I got through the line. And then I didn't have time to grab a sack lunch because I only had a few minutes to get to my Corps Member Advisory (CMA) group at 6:30am and there were already 20 people in line. Luckily we didn't go off campus and I found a bagel place. Then I had about 8 sessions, with about a 10 min break every so often, which we usually spent walking to another room, and a "working" lunch. It was fine -- more indoctrination. We finished around 4:30pm. I rushed back to my room, figured out how to get to Target because I needed to get a few things (like shampoo), got lost on the way back from Target for quite a long time, long enough that when I got back to UH, I only had about 20mins til our 7pm Welcome Ceremony, so I didn't have time to get dinner either. Though the Lunchables I just ate were satisfying enough. At the Welcome Ceremony, the CEO & founder Wendy Kopp spoke, which was cool. Wendy Kopp proposed Teach For America in her Princeton University undergraduate thesis at age 21, then raised $2.5 million of start-up funding and launched in 1989. So it was awesome to hear her talk.

Tomorrow, get up early, get on a bus by 6:32am to go to Sharpstown MS where I'll start teaching next week, spend all day til 4:30pm there doing various seminars and classroom observations, and then we have a training from 6:30-9:30pm. Yikes. Time to hit the hay...