Appreciation

Summer school teaching ended on Friday, so this is the first of many sentimental posts on what this crazy Institute experience means to me as it comes to an end this week. I honestly don't understand how the time has gone so quickly. I already miss my sixth graders so much, but more on that later. For now, I'll clue you into how amazing my CMA (Corps Member Advisor), basically my camp counselor, is. We had staff appreciation day on Friday, and we appreciated James with a video message from our entire CMA group, appropriately named SQUAD. I think there's an acronym that goes with SQUAD that somehow shows we want student achievement to happen, but we basically just made that up in order to keep this as a funny name. Oops. This was our video to James for his amazing dedication to our development and success as n00b teachers:

And here is a picture of SQUAD, in all of our glory. These people are all going to be teaching in the fall in Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Jacksonville, Seattle, and Detroit. My collaborative (I'll tell you more about them later) is all from different cities so I'm already cringing at the thought of starting my teaching career without those three hilarious and energetic guys by my side. I thought I was DONE with goodbyes when graduation happened! Apparently this is one element of adulthood that I just have to get used to: learning to say "see you later" to make it not suck so badly. They truly are my family here at TFA.