Welcoming myself

This is my first posting, so I welcome myself to the idea of dreaming my thoughts out loud and allowing others to openly criticize my meanderings in order to help me to look criticaly at myself and hopefully grow even more thoughtful and understanding of myself and others. As I think about my purpose I realize there is nothing I have to add to the human race except another opinion. That is a bit sad, but I hope to be able to analyze where I am and how I got here by being able to glance over my time here. I'm kinda thinking of it as a personal diary/guide/place to plunge into things that make me angry/sad/enthusiatic/gleeeful/or just plain silly.

I say a headline from a newspaper today that said writing blogs can cost you your job. That saddens me tremendously - especially in a country where we should not have any reason to fear self-expression.

I teach at a public school here in the USA - specifically working with special ed kids who are my life-blood - the ones who keep me alive.

My favorite quote this week is from one of my eight year old students who was running in the olympics and said "I was winning, and I would have won if everybody didn't try so hard to run faster than me." Started me thinking of the little ifs we all face in life.

Yesterday I spent my entire day thinking. Woulda been a good time to start a long-winded blog. A 6 year old student came up to me when I was sitting outside watching a few classes at recess. She asked me why I went to her aunties birthday party. I told her her auntie was one of my best friends, and her eyes got huge. I told her how much I respected her auntie, and I'm always happy to celebrate with people I love and respect. After I finished talking she looked at me for awhile, and I asked - is something the matter? She said, "but, you're white!" I laughed and said, "well, I'm sorry, honey, I just happened to be born that way - I hope it doesn't bother you."

I am bothered a lot by the fact that this student is so observant about little things like that. There were probably 120 people at that party (auntie turned 50, so it was a 'big one'), and it's true that my family and I were the only 'white' people there. In fact, we were teased because at one part during the party we hung out together as a family, and our dog was sitting near us. Our dog happens to be truly all white, and someone a few tables over who we all love made a silly comment thatw ere were the 'all white table'. We all took it for fun, and laughed.

But looking back at it through a six year old child's eyes - it really bothers me. What happened to the dream? The schools still teach it - nowadays even more than it was taught 20 years ago, and King died almost 20 years before that even - he definitely made the speech over 40 years ago. Yet, nothing has really changed. It's still a dream that we will judge each other by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. 40 years, and there are plenty of "words", but where is there a reality? I know I have made the mistake of not even seeing this reality - because I believe so much in the dream - until a six year old child points out to me just how blind I am to reality, and how much I am living in a dream world.