Day 1,

After discussing the logistics about classroom expectations and the path we are going to take during these weeks, David's initial routine to memories everyone's name was very interesting. Every time David seemed to forget someone's name, he would jump to call someone he knew and that seemed to help make a connection and will then come back to the person. Despite of my years teaching, I am kind of bad with memorizing names right at the beginning. Often I have found myself telling stories and forgetting important parts of it. I will skip that part and continue telling the story until I find a connector that remains me of the part I missed.

Since I still don't have the text "The right to speak" I decided to read some of the other two text to find some connections to our day today. The first thing that immediately grab my attention was the statement  that Lipman says "Don't try to be right, try to be yourself!" After all, we are all different and come from different backgrounds and have different talents.

Today, surely most of us had a story or two in mind to tell, but as we continue to listen to others tell their stories we all waited for clues and patterns to shape our own self and decided what story to use. Anna Deavere calls it "presence" in her first letter. "Presence means paying attention to find any opportunity to engage" and we all surely had presence during our stories.  We were able to find our presence to engage on today's activity and connect our stories between each other. Everyone's presence consisted of individualism, using different tones, facial expressions, body language and even singing.

For me, after listening to folk tales, I thought about my story of the bilingual cat in conjunction to the story of the bilingual mouse that I've learned from Antonio Sacre, but for some reason I didn't felt right. As I heard grandparents and treasures in the stories of others I began to reflect on a story I used once at the local School to teach about greed, sharing and to share a personals story mixed with a Mexican legend. It just felt right.