sidewalk scribbling

It could be a song or perhaps a photograph, or maybe someone else’s story.  But it’s usually out of the blue and it grabs at me like a strong hard tug on my arm.  Kind of cool how a thought can have such a physical impact.  And so it may be that my eyes glaze over during a Zumba class because that song reminds me of a friend who deleted all Avril Lavigne tracks from my laptop and had a playlist titled ‘Aisha’s playlist’ on her computer, which she would put on for me while I lay on her bed and she sat by her desk, letting me angst out my blues. Or it could be a random photograph of the university library that some random stranger has posted on Facebook, and it pulls me like a rolling whirling black hole into memories of blue sneakers (that I would sneak out of Mariam’s cupboard and probably wore more than she did – and the gray t-shirt which she just ended up giving to me), and the feel of the concrete sidewalk against the soles of my feet, the sidewalk that I wa...

Nothing makes you feel more like a giant than sitting on small wooden chairs surrounded by tiny first graders in their classroom.  For a classroom observation, we are supposed to slip into a class quietly and just sit in the back. We’re not to make any comments and neither is the teacher supposed to pay any attention to us. The idea is, of course, to observe a class as would be without your presence. My favorite class to observe is always in the pre-primary section where the students weigh almost the same as their chunky book bags and want at any point in time to color in their workbooks. The children are curious and bright-eyed, they keep peaking over their shoulders and giggling when they catch my eye. “Are you our new teacher?” they would often ask (in their minds all females on school premises are teachers). There is one special memory from these classroom observations that  sticks out and makes me smile even now. The teacher was walking around the classroom, tal...