Today was my first day in the schools and in uniform! It felt very official walking into the school all dressed in our reds, but it was mostly for show. The administration is waiting to give us suspended students until we’re embedded a little further into the school culture and the students know who we are. Our school works on the same team structure that my middle school did, with each grade divided into two different teams with their own teachers and students. Each of us has our own team, I’m with the 6th grade Dragon team (yes, I did choose it entirely because of the awesome name) and so I’ll be visiting their classes and going to their teacher meetings. It’s a bit strange, after spending most of my life in school, to suddenly be on the other side of the divide.
It was especially strange since I had my first Magazine Club meeting, which is an after school club that I’ll be running. It’s intense working with middle school students. I guess I was kind of expecting that it would be like the Writer’s Guild I was a part of in high school or with the other writing clubs I helped with in college, but it wasn’t. My students need a lot of supervision and it’s a lot of work as they really don’t know the first thing about writing, let alone making a magazine. I’m also realizing that I don’t have near as much classroom management skills as I thought I did. A lot of them are very hyper and not that interested in doing concentrated work, and some of them are only in the class at all because their parents signed them up for it. I came out of the program today a little disheartened.
But that’s okay. I knew that this was going to be difficult when I started it. I’m just going to have to readjust what I thought I was going to do to what will actually be practical. I’m sure I’ll manage just fine.
In other news, Zombie Walk was over the weekend. I woke up, spent several hours getting into makeup, and then took a series of buses down to Seattle Center, where the walk was. I think catching the buses in full zombie regalia was one of the best things about the day. Every couple of minutes I would see someone staring at me wide-eyed from a passing car or see someone walking by do a double-take. Some were scared, others were entertained, others had a moment of GOODGODITHOUGHTIWASREADYFORTHISBUTITOTALLYAMNOTANDISITREALLYTIMETOENACTMYMASTERPLAN??? before realizing I wasn’t really among the living dead.
When I finally got to the Space Needle I was excited to find the place packed with other zombies, and they only kept coming. There was a moment where the walk went down this huge hill and I looked back up to see the entire hill filled with shambling zombies…. which meant hundreds of crazy people just like me. It brought tears to my eyes.
I really enjoyed how they kept us moving, they led us on by waving a brain attached to a string on a stick and shouting “ZOMBIES, what do we want?” to which we replied “BRAINS!” and they said “AND WHEN DO WE WANT THEM?” to which we answered “BRAAAAAINNNNSSS!” We ran into one great street performer playing the banjo near the begging and we all gathered around him and zombie shamble danced in a huge circle to his music. He seemed a bit disconcerted by it but continued playing, much to his credit.
The only sad thing about the walk was that I (and about 40 other people) got distracted by a group of zombie hunters that were filming a video and got separated from the main walk chasing them. It was lots of fun, I got to shamble around public places (including the International Fountain) and scare people on buses and drag down zombie hunters, but I would have liked to stay with the main party.
Whooo Seattle!