The Chronicles Of Nay

Happy Tuesday! Today was an interesting day. We had a faculty meeting. It is always a pain to have meetings in the morning. In my opinion one frustrating thing that came out of Covid is everyone wanting to have zoom meetings. I want to meet in person! I want to look across the room and make eye contact with other people that I know had the same thought I did! I want to send random text messages to the awesome Librarian across the room and wait for her to react! I want to play coffee drinking games with people sitting near me. I want to hug, high five or fist bump people! Yes you read that correctly… HUG! Haha Well this faculty meeting I got to do all those things! It made getting up early completely worth it! 

I saw a tik tok this weekend that said something like what is a word or phrase that your family said growing up that you thought was normal. Well It got me thinking, so many of you know that school was important to my parents. Growing up it was always important. As a kid it was definitely more important to my parents than it was to me. My dad always used to say people will try to take a lot of things from you but one thing that they can never take from you is your education. And I always used to think such a weird statement. But as I’ve grown up I realized what he meant. He meant the knowledge and experiences I have acquired nobody can take away from me. Young Naomi didn’t understand that. So report card time was always a dreaded time for me. I tell my students all the time I was a horrible student. School did not come easy for me. I had to work really hard and sometimes I didn’t work as hard as I should have. Report cards would come out and my dad would inevitably tell me that he knew I could have done better. Looking back… He wasn’t wrong! Haha So my dad’s way of trying to encourage me to do better was to make me do manual labor. I have helped lay sod, concrete, I’ve planted trees, planted gardens, I’ve planted flower beds, I’ve torn up flower beds, and then replanted them, I helped put in a sprinkler system in the front yard, oh and in the backyard, I’ve harvested the garden the fruit trees, cleaned out the shed, and the garage. At the end of the day when I was hot and tired and frustrated and sore he would sit me down and he would tell me the famous line. He would tell me that I needed to go to college. I needed to get better grades so that I could go to college so that I could earn a degree. He told me when I got a degree I could work in the air conditioning. He didn’t go to college and get a degree so in the winter he had to work in the cold and in the summer he had to work outside in the heat. So he told me to go to college and get a degree so that I could work in the air conditioning. So that is part of why I went to college! 

At the old 6th grade building my classroom was an add-on and the air conditioner was a horrible unit. I often started out the beginning of the school year without air conditioning and in the spring the air conditioning wouldn’t work again. I had to call UEA a couple times to be like “yo I need air conditioning to teach and the students need it to learn!” Actually the heat didn’t work either but the air conditioning to me was a bigger deal you can keep on layering there’s only so much you can take off! So when I would get really frustrated and I would have to tell people again that my air conditioner wasn’t working inevitably the first thing that would come out of my mouth is I went to college. I have a degree. I’m supposed to be able to work in air conditioning!  Once I was calm and my air conditioner was working I ended up having to tell people the story as to why I say that I deserve to work in the air conditioning because I went to college! 

So we had a good laugh this weekend when I was talking to my parents on the phone. I was telling them that I’d mentioned the story to Pierce one day and now she tells kids all the time that they need to get their grades up so that they can go to college and work in the air conditioning. She tells them that my dad used to tell me that that’s how you get to work in the air conditioning. I wanted my dad to know that a whole new generation of Mexicanito children are hearing the speech that they need to go to college so that they could work in the air conditioning. I do understand that people that didn’t go to college get to work in climate control too. I also understand that people with degrees choose to work outside. However, looking back I see what he was doing. He was doing the best he could to make us understand that college was important. So here are a list of things that came out of this speech he used to give us: 

1. we both graduated from college 
2. I pay someone to do my lawn! 
3. I do not garden
4. I appreciate the work that manual labor people do
5. I am grateful that I do not have to do manual labor!

What is something that your parents said to you growing up that has helped make you who you are? This is just one of them! I am sure there are more and I am sure as I come across them I will share them with you! However, that is it for me for now. I am headed to bed! The plan is to get up early again tomorrow! Hope everyone has a good rest of the week!