Magic

As my sixteenth year of teaching concludes, just doing a bit of reflecting on how lucky I am to work with amazing educators and teach the best kids.

A few weeks ago,  during our poetry unit, we made all the students write a few poems. While I usually write the pieces I ask kids to, I hadn't yet, so when a student asked me, "Well, where's your poem, Brezek?" I decided I had better get to work. This is what came about.

Magic
Once upon a time
I stepped into a kingdom
where I was queen
and students were my little monsters

In the beginning, many days I felt
     Confused
     Overwhelmed and sometimes
     Sad
because my apprenticeship
had not yet prepared me
for the spells I had to cast
over my students.

In time I earned my wand
that radiates stardust over the littles, like
     love, and
     belonging, and
     acceptance;
making them sparkle and shine
inside and out.

The monsters picked up all those ELA tricks:
     20 pages a day
     Journals and quickwrites
     Signposts and book clubs
     TIQA and poetry
     Acing assessments

But even more dazzling was our family.
Kids quickly
     became besssstfriends
     joked together
     said hi in the hallways
     let their true selves be seen as they
     had lunch together and
     loved one another

Sixteen empires have come and gone
and not one has quite been
the special realm
that is
BB3

Thank you
for making my teaching life
magical.

Next year I'll be at Heritage, a school that is such a special place. I will continue as Literacy Coach but not have a section of ELA anymore. Hoping to coteach with a few of our teachers in various units throughout the year and can't wait! (Well, first day of summer... so I can wait a bit!) ;-)

Hope all the teachers have THE BEST summer vacation!

Recreational Drug Use

I'm not talking about weed. Or ecstasy for that matter.

I'm talking sugar.

The Standard American Diet is full of it. A typical day in my eating life of the yore could have gone like this: cereal for breakfast, or a bagel and OJ. A granola bar would have been an excellent morning snack. Lunch consisted of a PBJ, some pretzels, and a yogurt. Or a Lean Cuisine. I'd be hungry again around 2:30 or 3:00 so I'd reach for, oh, I don't know, a Zone Bar? Some Cheeze-its? For dinner it was pasta with garlic bread. Eating every 3 hours or so, and I was usually still hungry, cranky, sleepy, and irritated.

Can you see all the sugar there? Or the carbs that digest into glucose, which is the same thing?

Dr. Mark Hymann, in the video on this blog, referred to sugar as a recreational drug. The Standard American Diet has us eating too many carbs, including too much pop and other sugary drinks, and too much processed food. (80% of processed food has added sugar!) We are eating this way, and we shouldn't be, and he feels so strongly about sugar, he says it should be consumed only very sparingly. Let me show you what happens when you eat a day's worth of food like the one I mentioned above:

(Side note: I'm pretty sure I got this right, but it's all super new to me, so if you find an error, please tell me!)

Your body wants to maintain an equilibrium, called homeostasis. A constant temperature and balanced blood sugar levels are examples of this. If you eat a bowl of Lucky Charms and a side of toast for breakfast, you get that super quick surge of energy from the sugar. But the body does not like for blood sugar to be high, so the pancreas releases insulin to ferry the sugar from the blood, and sends it one of three places: the liver, the muscles, or fat cells.

As the insulin goes to work, your blood sugar levels don't just go to normal range, they crash way below normal. This crash signals your brain that you're hungry again, and the hormones coursing through your system leave you craving those same sugars it just removed from the blood. You reach for the granola bar and then the whole cycle repeats itself for the second time that day.

This is where we've been misled about dieting and calorie counting or carb counting or counting whatever. We shouldn't be counting anything. We shouldn't be eating every three hours. Instead, we should just be eating those nutrients that will satiate us and keep our blood sugar in normal range. When you eat that way, you can have three meals a day and be good to go.

In Body Love, Kelly LeVeque suggests instead we create meals around these four macronutrients, the Fab4:

Green and fibrous carbohydrates
Purpose: promotes gut health by feeding the beneficial bacteria, adds all the essential vitamins and minerals we need, removes toxins from the body
Green carbohydrates, think: Organic veggies deep in color (have as much as you want!)
Fibrous Carbohydrates, think: fruit, whole grains (including oatmeal, pasta, and whole-grain breads, rice, wheat, seeds and nuts, starchy veggies such as potatoes, corn, and squash, and beans, lentils, and peas (should be a small portion of your meal)

Protein
Purpose: cell and tissue growth, signals to your brain you're full
Think: Grass fed beef, free range chicken, wild caught fish, eggs, a protein powder with a full amino-acid complex (Arbonne's!), quinoa, buckwheat, chickpeas

Fat
Purpose: brain functioning, hormone production and balance, immune protection, slows digestion
Think: Wild caught fatty fish, avocados, the oils: olive, coconut, or a clean butter, and nuts, chia seeds

LeVeque says, "When the body doesn't get sufficient amounts of these food sources, or the foods come in a form that has been modified by chemicals or is low in nutrients, the body adjust in a number of negative ways, most of which lead to weight gain and inflammation." (p. 18)

Basically, if you are not eating that way most of the time, your body is probably in a constant state of inflammation, which means your organs are working OVERTIME, ALL THE TIME to correct everything back as close to homeostasis as possible. This chronic inflammation manifests as a variety of symptoms: acne, psoriasis, weight gain, poor sleep, migraines, PMS, brain fog, etc etc. If left untreated, ask LeVeque goes on to say, "Your body might turn on itself and develop diseases such as atherosclerosis, diabetes, and cancer" (p. 19).

You guys, knowledge is power, and I'm so glad I learned all of this! Now, I know if I'm going to reach for that donut, I will be aware of the crash that will follow shortly thereafter, and I will have some kind of Fab 4 meal or shake or snack nearby to stop the cycle from repeating. It's not that we can never indulge, it's just that we have to know how to respond when we do decide to have that treat.

Optimal blood sugar levels, created by eating #Fab4 at each meal

I'll be back again soon with another post on some of my favorite Fab 4 smoothie recipes. Some people say that a protein shake isn't a real meal, but I disagree. Mine are packed with vegan protein, spinach, avocado oil, fiber, and some fruit to sweeten it up. We're talking 5-6 hours of no hunger and no cravings because your blood sugar is set to a normal range. That's a win in my book!

If you don't want to wait, here are a few things you can do now:


1. Contact me about Arbonne's 30 Days to Healthy Living (30DHL). Our program is built around balancing blood sugar, creating optimal gut health, and eating clean, all of which will lead to reducing inflammation in the body and releasing those symptoms mentioned above!

2. Get a copy of Body Love and read for yourself.

3. Watch Fed Up on iTunes, I watched it last night, $3.99 rental.

Thoughts? I'd love to hear from you! Have you completed a 30DHL? Read Body Love or watched Fed Up? Were you already aware of this blood sugar situation or is this new? Please leave a comment with your feedback!

Be well, friends!

overcommitted, but still finding the joy

Last week was rough for me. In particular last Friday was the worst. I was on exhaustion status which ran my patience thin. Then I reached out to a parent and had a response that I wasn't expecting. And so I cried. I got off the phone and went in the a quiet office to shake it off, and then went on about my day.

I haven't written since before then too, I have bitten off waaaay more than I can chew. I do this sometimes. Volleyball? Love it. Volunteering at church? Also love. Slicing in march with all my friends? Yes, please. But add that to all my other commitments and getting closer towards spring break and it's a recipe for disaster.

The last post I composed and connected with TWT was about a week ago, and around that time I had also read the post on TWT storytelling and band-aids. There's definitely moments when I'm writing on steam of consciousness and not doing the bit-by-bit storytelling. I think in the past week I  got in my head and was judging my work, and perhaps the past eight days when I haven't blogged, maybe I've given up a little.

But then I got an invitation to blog with friends. I was supposed to do this last Thursday, but then things were really hectic, and to be completely honest, I totally forgot.

But I've been remembering about this appointment ever since last Thursday at this time. Right now I'm visiting a fifth grade classroom and it's...peaceful. The room is lovingly managed by two teachers who hold very high expectations for the kids, and yet also find ways to joke and laugh with them in such a way that they kids can get right back to work shortly after. Their morning meeting was calming and full of smiles and now students are scattered around the room writing in flexible seating spots. A new friend came up and sat and chatted with me, and now we are sitting side by side, writing together.

What I love about this TWT community (and my local community here in Berwyn) is the connection it brings. To sit down with someone, and just be in the same space, even if that means you are sitting without talking, and writing instead, I honestly can't think of another place I'd rather be at this moment. Thank you KS and KVW for inviting me, and not being upset with me when I totally spaced last week. This moment has reinvigorated my writing life this month!

🤷🏽‍♀️

No ideas now.

Too lazy to create one.

So this is it, kids.

Original Gangsta

This isn't even my slice to tell, but it was so funny, I had to post it.

My ELA class is a combination of 7th and 8th grade students. They stay for two years, so our current eighth graders are on year two with us. It's cool, because they become the mentors to the seventh graders.

Yesterday, when I was home sick, I guess one of the seventh graders told one of the eighth graders that he needed to rename the turtle (the stuffed animal turtle that sits in the window and is used as a talking piece sometimes during discussions).

She replied, "You aren't even an OG in this class, you can't name the turtle!"

My coteacher told me she overheard this conversation yesterday and meant to text it to me last night. Kids are so funny, especially when they use language like this in the perfect context!

hope

I am on the RCIA team at my church. Last night, we all went over to the cathedral in Chicago for the Rite of Election. All of the candidates have signed the Book of Elect, and are joining the Catholic faith at the Easter Vigil.

It was just a beautiful service. The church is much different than my home church, must more.... angular. But beautiful in a totally different way!

And the most beautiful thing? Probably a few hundred people who feel called to the Catholic faith, all going to complete the Sacraments in a few short weeks.

Before Old St. Pats, I noticed the "churchy" people, but didn't get it. It felt a certain way to read when they posted bible verses, a way that was just confusing to me. I kinda stayed away because we fear what we don't understand usually, right?

But now I'm one of those people. Now I get it, because now I know how much peace I find sitting in the pews at my home church. The music is beautiful, our priests give the best homilies, and each Sunday I am filled up with so much joy that I feel compelled to go forward and find all the abundant things in my life... and attempt to share them with others :-)

So to all of those people who are going to be baptized and then confirmed on Easter Vigil, thank you for reminding us of all the hope that exists in our community. In spite of all the brokenness that is the Catholic Church, each of you are a reminder that there is so much hope to be found in this precious life.

good news!

This is a model from writing I picked up watching Rachel Hollis on Amazon Prime in Made for More. Before they start their training, they ask the crowd to share good news. This news could be simple things like "I found my fave new shoes ON SALE" or bigger things like, "My cousin beat cancer." All news is good news, so here is some from me today.

Good news!
I got a huge chunk of my To Do list completed on Thursday.

Good news!
The weather in Chicago is creeping up into the 40s. It's a heat wave!

Good news!
My class's behavior was ON POINT Thursday. Like, so much that I offered 15 minutes of free time tomorrow (first time all year) if they could do that again. It was BLISSSSSSS.

Good news!
I saw Aziz Ansari the other night. SOOO GOOD.

Good news!
The last of four book club books came in and our new 7th grade book clubs are all set in poetry: The Crossover, Brown Girl Dreaming, Bronx Masquerade, and Home of the Brave. Can't wait to get started with these after spring break!

Good news!
After days of indulging on not-so-healthy food choices, it's always great to return to routines and add health back in via densely nutritious protein shakes and detox teas.

Good news!
We rolled the clocks back so the daylight will stay with us even longer now. Summer is on the horizon!