Thanks to the Dr. Will Show for letting me discuss blogging and education!
Tag: education
Stop and Figure Out What’s Yours
It starts with checking your phone in bed. You wake up at 5:30AM, because it’s a habit you never really learn to let go of, even over summer vacation. Your eyes blink open, and your brain shoots a rapid fire message to all channels: “HOLY CRAP WHAT TIME IS IT AM I LATE?!”
You ignore the warm body stirring next to you and reach over. Grab your phone. As blue light bounces off your face, you get not just the time, but a reminder of the million other things you could look at right now. Your twitter notifications, what email came in over night. You decide a quick peek won’t hurt.
The peek turns into just answering an email or two. Then maybe a tweet. You chuckle as someone replies, begin to reply back, then try to quiet down so as to be considerate. You decide to quickly skim the news. It’s all important– an email from your principal, outstanding actions from fellowships, requests to host this chat or read this piece. It’s all good stuff. This is what it means to be a 21st-century educator, right? You’re always on. You’re always up-to-date. You’re always connected. You have to be ready to go at any time, because the world is still turning when your body is in bed.
All of a sudden, it’s 7:00AM. The person next to you kisses your cheek. “I love you,” you say, blue light bouncing off your chin as you look up. You don’t want them to forget as the rest of the world gets your attention.
“You too.” They patter off to get ready for their day. The shower runs. You find an article to share out. A witty note to add before the link. Scrape the meat off so it’s at 140. Good to go.
You put your phone down while your partner gets ready. You take a second, ask them about their day. You’re on summer break, so they don’t really ask about yours. Not because they don’t care, but because they can probably guess: gym. work. Summer can be a time to recharge, but you’re amusedly surprised to find out that constantly trying to better everything about yourself— your practice, your writing, your understanding of the world, your body– takes up a lot more time than anyone realizes (you included).
They have to go, you kiss them goodbye. “I love you,” you let them know, almost desperately. They know, and you know they know, and you trust that they love you too. The desperation isn’t that love isn’t there, but that it’s the only thing about yourself that feels constant and true anymore. It’s the knowledge that the sun rises in the morning. Everything else is a series of hop-skip-jumps along a path you’re trying to figure out as you go and that you’re pretty sure you’re going to screw up at some point.
They leave, and the phone is right back in your hand. You respond to a message, there’s another email. It should be made clear that none of this is drudgery, you love what you’re doing right now. It’s what fuels you. It’s the main part of you that feels talented, strong, smart.
Before you know it, another hour has gone. You hop a bus home. You go to the gym for a few hours. Write, email, tweet in between sets, at stoplights. You’re never not-available. You’re never disconnected.
You get home. Write, edit, read a new piece (you’re a teacher, after all). Suddenly, it’s 4:30P, and you know that the day is rapidly coming to a close. You wonder where the time went. You wonder if you used it well. Didn’t you want to try and go on a hike today?
Now, you’re a little annoyed. At what, you’re not sure, but you are. You have to figure this out.
You get up. You look in the mirror. The contents of the apartment you’ve been in for less-than-a-year are still scattered about, so you never really moved in. It barely feels like yours anyway– no more so than the last less-than-a-year apartment, or the one before it. You’re always looking for something better, and when you think you’ve found it, something else always pops up.
You stop looking at the apartment and back in the mirror. Your face is there. Nose, eyes, mouth. You like your face, generally, but some days when you actually look at it, it’s a shock that it’s yours. It doesn’t really feel like yours.
It takes a second, and then you realize what’s been frustrating you for the past hour, day, week, months: when did you stop taking a second to quietly revel in ownership of yourself? When did your actions become a reaction to everything you thought you needed to do to be yourself? Did you actually ask yourself what “you” (in all senses of that word) looks like right now?
You tilt your head– one way, then another. Put your hand your collarbone, feel the body stretch and grow beneath the skin as you breathe in. Breathe out again. Your chest collapses. Your heart beats. Yours.
The mark of the modern educator may be connectedness, but if the mark of a great educator is being authentic to yourself, I should probably take a second to figure out who that person is. That process doesn’t end, and it doesn’t need to be public. If anything, it needs to be in the quiet moments of my own breath, or the soft spaces with people where the walls are down and my own existence feels like enough.
I’ve been beating myself up all week because I didn’t have anything to say here. I realized that I’ve been so focused on authoring myself for other outlets, I lost sight of my own center.
I don’t have a lot of time left, but I think it might be enough to stop and make sure I understand where I am right now. So when the real work begins, I know exactly who is in the classroom with my students, and not the approximation of who I was trying to create.
Am I An Asshole?
or Trying to Self-Author My Story
(feeling tl;dr?)
“I was looking through your resume and saw you have a website! Why did you decide to do that? What do you… do on it?” My manager for a social justice pilot I’m in asked as she got to know me
I felt a trickle of sweat roll down my neck. My stomach clenched a little, and the flurry of self- doubt and deprecation began to scroll through my mind:
how could I think I needed a website? she must think I’m such an asshole. It’s so dumb. I’m not even a good writer. I don’t deserve that site. I don’t deserve it.
I sighed, and took a big breath, and repeated a mantra I’ve been trying to remember in times of doubt: Take. Up. Space.
So I told her a story. I talked about how fellow educolor member Bill Fitzgerald messaged me, saying he noticed that my name was available as a domain. I had considered it briefly, but didn’t know if I deserved a site. He responded, “Your writing and ideas need a broader audience, and you deserve a home for them that you control.”
His words stuck with me. Clearly, I shouldn’t need anyone to validate me (and Bill is excellent at owning his privilege), but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t help.
The biggest obstacle is fear of looking like a braggart or an asshole. The first word that actually comes up is that I shouldn’t “mayabang,” or “boast” in Tagalog. It’s ancestral– not because my parents weren’t very verbal and constant with their praise and affection, but because that’s not who we are. Women in general are often told not to be too “high and mighty” about our achievements, lest we appear bitchy. The idea that I ever show pride about the things I’ve done has a weird, gross, undercurrent of things-you-can-feel-but-never show.
Which is difficult, because Western leadership often values the exact opposite. Where does that leave me?
I don’t think that taking up space means assimilating to the cult of personality, but I do think it means accepting and navigating the squicky things that come with creating that space– and ultimately, doing it. Again, if I think my voice matters, I also have a right to protect and control spaces I create.
If there’s a place between “OMG CHECK OUT HOW AWESOME I AM BRUH” and not sharing– the “Hey! Here’s a thing I wrote that I’m proud of!” space– I should try and find it.
Because, here’s the thing: I am proud of my work. I am proud of the stuff I’m doing and think that it occasionally deserves being shouted out.
Does that make me an asshole? Even just writing that felt weird, and I’ve written and deleted this post a few times, but I think it may be time to stop pretending I only self-deprecate and don’t take pride in what I do. If I didn’t, why would I continue doing it?
If I believe that women, especially WoC writers, should control, create and self-author their own space, I should walk the walk and try and do it myself if it’s what I want.
So, I bought a domain, which you’re on now. I share and write a lot about race and social justice issues, especially in education. I sometimes often share that on facebook. I think that has come to be… strange for some of the people I’m friends with. Not all of my family agrees with me (which is 100% fine), and I’m sure a lot of my friends and family are a bit oversaturated. Sometimes, I am too.
Normally, I’m a big believer in the Donna Meagle school of Social Media:
but I know things are different on facebook. I don’t want to lose connection with family and friends who want to mutually share in each other’s joy of cute animals, babies, and vacations. That space should exist too, even for me.
I don’t mean no one should put hard news on facebook. Plenty of us do. It’s more an exercise for me in finding balance– something I sorely lack.
So, tl;dr
Part of creating space is knowing when to give it. So, with the help of other great mentors (Alex, JLV, Doug), I’m doing something a bit crazy for me and created a facebook space to talk all things social justice, race, and education writing. As I begin to freelance a little more, I hope it will also be helpful.
It could be great. It also might go horribly. I really have no idea. I was worried I would look like an asshole doing it. JLV loving came back, “Then you’re an asshole. Over it?”
And I think I am. If only to try new things, maybe I need to do things that at least push me outside my comfort zone. If “being an asshole” means “fighting for self-authored space,” I just might be fine with that. At the end of the day…
and there’s nothing I can do.
Teachers Are Not The Sun: Recentering Our Classrooms
I’m really into centering and focus lately in my teaching practice. The more and more I understand how it affects my everyday life, the more I see its implications in my work.
So, this weekend, I was frustrated when I saw not just one, but THREE separate discussions that, paraphrased, said, “if you’re a non-educator or not a teacher, I’m not interested in your opinion on my classroom.”
And I was like:
then I was like:
.
Like, damn. As mentor and #educolor member Melinda Anderson pointed out, it’s an “epidemic.”
But I get it. I get it. Being a teacher is hard. Real hard. We face a lot of outside babble from folks trying to tell us how to do the job and actually being totally wrong, because you don’t know what a classroom is like until you step in there.
That’s really frustrating, and I understand if it has made us guarded. It makes us want to protect the few precious parts of our job that we have ownership over, that don’t feel stripped away by testing we may not agree with or other bureaucracy that, often, doesn’t make sense in our classrooms. You have a right to feel frustrated and skeptical. I often do too.
Still, you’re really gonna tell me that the only people qualified (or even those who are most qualified) to have an opinion on education are only teachers?
Only teachers are capable of understanding the ~mystical ways~ of our students, or our classrooms? Better yet (or worse), you wanna tell me that the academics from places that–you guessed it– are often institutionally racist/sexist/privileged know more about kids than their parents or community?
If you really think that the parents, community members, and other important folks in a student’s life don’t have just as much right to have an opinion as you do, what are you even doing here, bruh?
That sounds harsh, but for all the talk I see about “student-centered” classrooms, I see VERY LITTLE walking the walk.
So many teachers make it all about them and refuse to take outside support from community members. That’s an incredibly frustrating thing to witness, and I’m not even a parent! I can’t imagine what rage I would feel if my kid’s teacher told me that even though I share culture, race, and background with my student (beyond, ya know, being related to and raising this child), I unequivocally cannot have an opinion about what happens for hours a day in that classroom.
Don’t get me wrong: parents aren’t always able to see a clear picture of their kids either, at least for the time students are in the classroom. Sometimes, we have to remind folks what we’re seeing in the day-to-day. I’m not saying that parents or community members are always right.
But, especially when most teachers are White women, I have a hard time believing that they have any right to only listen to their opinion, or the opinion of outsiders to a community and ignore those who are from the community. How is that student centered?
Melinda brought up this excellent point when we talked about it online: when many of your teachers are not from the community and don’t share the cultural context of their students, forcing parents and community members to stay silent is a form of colonialism in our practice.
Communities have the right to self-author their stories through their children. My job as a teacher isn’t to outshine or shout over that– it’s to expose them and give them the tools to help them share it even louder!
The lack of humility it takes takes to decide that your voice or only your views on education have merit is not just rude, it’s dangerously restrictive and privileged. You do not get to call your teaching “student centered” when you purposefully ignore the voices and beliefs of those who influence student lives in favor of what you believe is “educated” thought.
I tend to think of a school community a little like a solar system. If my students are the center (which they should be), like the sun, then the bodies closest to them– parents, coaches, teachers etc– are the ones that not only have largest spheres of influence and connection (gravitational pull, if you will), but also the most reliable knowledge about what it’s like closest to that center.
I am very bad at art, but since I am trying to improve my visual aids, I have put together this Google Drawing to illustrate what I’m thinking:
As the chart shows (fancy, I know), no one is cut out of the picture here (and this is a pretty unfinished picture, despite how ~fancy~ it is). No one is saying that even the media or edu-companies should be cut out.
All I’m saying is this, bottom line: the closer you are to kids, the more you have a shared language, cultural context, and understanding of not just them, but all the stories that helped make them them, the more you can help.
Sometimes, even a lot of times, that’s a teacher. Sometimes, though, it’s not just a teacher, you know?
Look, no one is saying to silence teacher voice. Clearly, teachers are the ones in the trenches, day-to-day, dealing with what happens in schools. Saying that parent voice matters or community voice matters does NOT mean we ignore teacher voices, or even the voices of academia.
Research (especially from researchers who are social-justice-oriented or from communities we teach in, but that’s another post) is not the enemy. Teachers or parents aren’t the enemy. Even edtech companies aren’t the enemy. No one is the enemy. Everyone has something cool to offer. It’s not a zero-sum game. No one has to win or lose. We can all win.
The only way that happens, though, is if we consistently center the work on our students. If you really want to serve students, and center on them, but you have no relationships with students, you know what you’re probably going to be driven to do? TALK TO SOMEONE WHO DOES AND GIVE WEIGHT TO THEIR THOUGHTS.
And teachers? If we truly center on our students– as often as we can– and ask ourselves: who knows more about this kid right now? I bet the answer may not be us, or the amazing teaching practice book we just read, or that awesome article we loved when we were in teacher prep.
It’s probably going to be a parent, family member, friend or better yet: the student themselves.
I love teachers. I am teacher. I love being one, and I love working with other great teachers. I’m just asking us to remember– when it’s hot outside, when summer has us punchy and squirmy– to remember why we got into the work. Don’t cut out the people that help create the folks you really want to help the most: your students.
Why “The Privilege Line” Is A Frustratingly Unfinished Exercise
(and how to make it better…Maybe)
So, recently Buzzfeed’s video on privilege has been making the rounds. The video shows a group of folks doing the classic privilege walk exercise (many exist, here’s one and another, haven’t used either though).
Let me preface with: props to BuzzFeed for tackling the issue at all. Not enough organizations are even broaching the topic, and it’s a commendable start.
That said, this version of the exercise is unfinished. In fact, most people do this exercise in a way that may have some tough consequences for the PoC involved– me included. I have done and led this exercise multiple times, and each time I have done it much the same way, because that’s how I saw it done. Then, I saw the below reaction, as well as some reactions from folks online:
Someone else from my Twitter TL talked about this, but for the life of me I can’t find the tweet or remember who. If I’m straying too close to someone else’s work, please let me know!
Essentially, when you’re a PoC or from another oppressed background, you inevitably end up in the back.
And you know that you will.
Lack of privilege, for those who experience that, isn’t new. We don’t usually need that constant reminder– we know. Privilege and “power” as defined by larger society are obvious markers for those of us who lack them. The exercise itself centers on whiteness, and the PoC often end up as props to help White people see how privileged they are.
Which… I get. I get often needs to be done. WP need to see, somehow, the privilege they live in, and if this does it, then that might be a start. Still, by refocusing on whiteness, we only (as Brittany Packnett says) “reproduce White privilege” within the context of the exercise, and that rubs me the wrong way.
But here’s what else we can do:
When I do this exercise from now on, I want to start doing the line again, but with a different version of the questions. Something that centers on and calls out the unique ways PoC have their own forms of power, questions that uplift communities and also pushes PoC to question their own experiences with each other. Questions like:
- Step forward if you have a strong understanding of your family’s history and culture.
- Step forward if you speak a second language.
- Step forward if you have a specific community of people who share similar familiar and cultural contexts with you?
I don’t know. I feel like if, the second time, the exercise were done but “power” were REdefined away from common ideas of “privilege,” it’d be an interesting look at where we SHOULD be headed and how we could recenter on something other than the hegemony.
Is that crazy? A horrible idea? Can you think of other, community-empowered questions? Let me know in the comments or something. I’d love to share.
Desperately Seeking Fun
I’ll admit it: I have recently been regretting taking on a summer school position.
Don’t get me wrong: the pay is decent (I think?), the kids are generally well-behaved, I have a lot of leeway in what I do with students (hence: social justice Fridays). Still, I think that both myself and the program lead seemed to ignore the fact that at the end of the day, you still have 20+ pairs of eyes looking at you asking “What’s Next?” Sure, there’s no grading involved, and there is (or should theoretically be) a lot less pressure, but still the 20+ minds in the room are there to be taught, dammit, so I better come up with something good, ya know?
Now, I normally love that about teaching. It’s one of the reasons I came back— I need the energy and, frankly, that accountability. But it’s also really tiring and it has made me a little grumpy. <pityparty>With summer here, a lot of my friends and colleagues are (rightfully) resting, adventuring, doing other things that I want to be doing. I’d love to be on a hike or a long run at 9:45AM on a Tuesday. Sadly, I am normally telling my kids to work on their articles for the newsletter at that time.</pityparty>
OK, I got that out of my system, which is good. I still get summer (technically) off, and I will still get to do lots of those things, so it’s not all bad.
Plus, I seem to forget that I really like kids when I let myself. Even when I snap at them or get frustrated, they do things like this:
And that was after I got snippy with her. Even when I don’t want to do it, the kids are out there, having fun and being great and having fun.
At the end of the day, this is one of their greatest gifts, and one of the things I truly love about teaching: kids force you to seek joy, live in laughter, and see hope in everything, because that’s how they see the world. Even kids in dire circumstances are often the ones who ask the toughest questions and because of that, dream the biggest dreams. The biggest mistake I could make as a teacher would be to try and squash that sense of wonder, delight, and enjoyment of the world.
So, I vow to join them. I have about 10 days left with them. I am desperately seeking fun, the bright side, and joy.
An Astronomical Pull – Re-Centering the Work
I haven’t known what to write.
After the Charleston Shooting, I was at a loss for what to say, and while the conversation has improved from some folks, the amount of hate, frustration, and sheer ridiculousness of what’s out there hurts. There’s nothing I can say that hasn’t been said by some people I respect a lot, like Mr. Chase, Mr. Lehmann, and the EduColor Newsletter.
Then, I saw this tweet:
https://twitter.com/polyhansen/status/611573714086445056
that led me to have this reaction:
https://twitter.com/biblio_phile/status/611697685167345664
And here’s the thing that people, especially those with power, especially white people forget: power has an incredibly strong pull. Its center of gravity takes anything thrown in its orbit and makes it revolve around Power. Power always wants to focus on itself. Power consistently takes whatever is happening and asks, but what about ME?!
Sometimes, that manifests ourselves obviously: I don’t want to talk about it. I am uncomfortable. I don’t feel that way/haven’t experienced it that, so someone else’s feelings don’t matter.
Sometimes, though, that manifests much more subtly. Even if you want to be helpful, making everything focus on your needs and trying to help YOU help others doesn’t always feel helpful, especially when it’s about race. In fact, it can be immensely tiring.
I think,when you decide to teach, or when you decide to work in public to service, we must decenter ourselves from whiteness– the strongest power in these discussions– but always myself from the center of the spaces we inhabit. As the teacher, a classroom shouldn’t center around my needs, but the students. We have to realize that it’s not always about us.
That seems hypocritical, of course, to say on a blog with my name in the URL. So, I am trying figure out my space in the middle— sometimes as a Woman of Color who is working to figure these things out and take up space, and also as attempting to ally to communities that I want to serve. Right now, that means amplifying as many voices, especially Black voices, as I can, and in the words of my friend Bill, “just shutting up and listening hard.”
I hope that my “ally” friends will do the same. We have to learn when to stop trying to “fix” things and just ask “how can I help?” Sometimes that means just amplifying voices instead of barging in with all of your needs and wants.
As teachers, it means making sure our students have spaces to process if they are the ones in marginalized spaces, or that we are pushing them to discuss difficult things, even when it feels scary. It is totally doable. Today, I was able to start the discussion using an easy and effective Teaching Tolerance lesson. Get there.
I fear what happens if we don’t. I worry that we will just continuous be pulled and re-centered around what is most powerful, until everything else is burned off in its wake, left to drift out alone.
We Rarely Ever Leave: Figuring Out How I Feel About TFA
It’s been a while since I wrote about Teach For America.
I’ve mostly tried to… avoid it. After publishing something in Medium, I realized that I was sort of tired of talking about it. TFA had compromised the entirety of my adult life, and now I was in a strange place of anger, frustration, and also a deep appreciation for the people I had met. I just wanted to try and let it all go.
So I haven’t talked about TFA in a while. I used to tweet and write about it a lot, then I just… stopped. I cut the cord with TFA much like a break up. I stopped engaging. Occasionally, I asked our mutual friends (aka friends-still-on-staff) how things were going, I wondered what the org was up to at that moment, I’d go on long binges of stalking it on facebook (mostly to cheer on my friends’ work).
Recently, though, I actually quietly rejoined the organization as a part-time staff member (freelancer? contractor? IDK, I do some work for TFA and they pay me. It works out). I heard that TFA was looking to grow its Education 4 Justice program, a pre-corps social justice journey that corps members would go through during the year before they teach.
It was run by people in the org I trusted, so I decided why not apply? As I was writing the application essay, I wrote something that surprised me:
As an alumna who has recently been critical of the organization, I feel its my obligation to put in the work to fix the issues I see with Teach For America.
I got in, and when I went to the training I realized something very important: I am not alone in the work. It’s so easy to look at the monolithic “brand” of Teach For America (and yes, we brand very well, don’t we?) and forget that there a lot of individual rabble-rousers still in the org, making sure it grows from the white savior roots that have made the organization struggle in the past.
There are lots of great people who criticize the organization, but there are also amazing folks who are within the organization, using the power there for good. At the end of the day, the organization has attracted many dedicated, caring, really smart people.
And, as much as I at times have refused to admit it, working with other TFA folks felt, in some ways, like home. There is a culture of the org, especially among people of color or working towards social justice, a shared language that is soothing in its familiarity. As much as the org frustrates me, to deny its influence in my life would be to deny a large part of my identity and origins in education.
So, yes, there are still some things about the organization that make me really frustrated, and parts of the organization that I think need to be overhauled. I also know that TFA and a lot of its staff members put a lot of work into making me a decent teacher. I also owe any time and effort I can give to help make the organization a better tool to support and uplift communities.
I guess we rarely ever leave something behind. We can completely cut ties, but at the end of the day the parts of us that we perhaps feel strange about are still there. They are still tied to us– gossamer strings of memories, habits, influences– that can never really never be cut. We rarely ever leave the places we move on from. We merely stop occupying the space in the same way.
A Summer Letter to My Students
My Wayfarers and My ‘Ohana,
The year has just finished, and I hear you singing outside as you’re wrapping up your year.
Today, I was at my desks, listening to your chatter, and I was struck by this perfect, simple thought:
I finally know what home is.
I don’t know if you’ll remember my class years from now, but I think I’ll remember you. I don’t know if my class will have a lasting impact on your life, but it’ll stick with me for a while. You were my first when I decided to come back to teaching. You showed me what it was to start digging into this work.
So, when I struggle with the concept of home, thank you for letting me learn alongside you. Thank you for helping me see that home has been right here, watching you all grow.
Please keep sharing your voices. Please, keep telling your stories. They are so worthy of being shouted from the rooftops. You are all so marvelous.
With lots of aloha,
Ms. Torres
And special edit for yearbook because it ks the best and Maya asked for it. ❤️
Take Up Space (and Protect It Too)
Recently, in my reading, my talking with students, I’ve been repeating the same mantra over and over:
Take. Up. Space.
Initially, it’s a phrase and piece of advice I’ve heard given to women and people of color over and over– take up space. Society so often tells us to silence ourselves, “shrink ourselves, to make ourselves smaller” space for others: take up that space. Put your arm on the armrest in the airplane. Insist that able-bodied men move to the side as you run down the sidewalk. Write your articles in your voice and ensure that your voice is heard in White-dominant spaces.
Take. Up. Space.
I know I’ve been trying to do that more. I’m a big believer in speaking with your ears, but I’ve been trying to do as much as I can to get involved in work that matters to me: fellowships and writing for organizations I believe in or just being involved. As Educolor founder Jose Vilson mentioned in his most recent piece: my experiences as an educator and as a woman of color needs to be taken seriously and valued by folks– myself included.
This weekend, though, I’ve also realized that access to my voice is a privilege not a right. I’m not saying I’m the be-all-end-all of human existence, but if I believe I am worthy of taking up physical/emotional/intellectual space, I think that also means that I get to unapologetically say that it is worth taking care of and protecting as well. Having to consistently speak up, especially around difficult topics, is emotionally taxing. Sometimes, “taking up space,” also means loving yourself enough to protect that space.
I don’t really know what that looks like yet. Most of it, I think, is self-care. There have been a few times this weekend where I was very tempted to jump in on conversations, often around ~Hollywood~. In spaces that are so clearly White and patriarchal, it feels mind-numbing to see those convos and not feel like any voice of reason will jump in.
Funnily enough, I got some of that clarity from catching part of Mr. Holland’s Opus on TV last night (I know, not really straying from White-patriarchy, but alas). There’s a scene where he brings up something I struggle with a lot as a teacher– there’s always more you can be doing, but you run the risk of neglecting your own life and family (and visa versa). It’s immensely hard to find that balance, both with time and with emotional openness.
A lot of that, though, comes down to me. I may want to jump convos that make my blood boil, but sometimes, it’s important to just… let that go. Sometimes, it’s worth deciding that the people still debating those things may not be worth my time, voice, and thought right now. If my space is worth asserting, it’s also worth protecting too.
Christina Torres 
