February and March Sophie Update: A “date”, accepting ambiguity, and Easter

Dear Family,

And look at that, it’s April.

Some of you may have noticed that I did not publish a letter in February. Whoops.

I hope that you can forgive me. I promise nothing all that exciting happened, but several February events and random thoughts will appear in this letter, so never fear.

For examples, I need to spend a little bit of your time talking about Valentine’s Day! My third one away from home, and the holiday is holding up for me. I have very fond memories of Valentine’s Day because of my mother, who made a conscious effort to instill her children with realistic expectations for the people we love rather than hallmark-worthy plots that would leave us feeling disappointed by any attempts that any real man could possibly make. She did this by making a family tradition of exchanging hand-crafted valentines, baking a heart-shaped cake, and encouraging the family to take the evening to spend time together.

Thanks to my mom, I have always loved Valentine’s Day.

This year, not only did I receive a package from my mom containing these wonderful hand-crafted valentines, but I also attended several Galentine’s Day parties and celebrated Valentine’s Day in a more traditional way with Luke. Valentine’s Day (and the entire week surrounding it) is always fun, but it seems to find more ways to be exciting every year. The longer I live away from home, the more women (and people generally, but really, let’s talk about the women) I find I cherish.

Whether it be women from my Relief Society in my ward, my missions, my apartment, or my life before my mission (who have stuck around impressively), I love to spend time with them and continually cultivate my relationships with them. I realized while I was a missionary that I had held on to a need for male validation in my adolescence that I attribute to my fervent desire to go camping and hiking like the Boy Scouts. Luckily, I have come to truly appreciate my female friendships, despite a pervading lack of camping trips in my life.

It’s also possible that I feel the need to compensate for all the time that I have recently been spending with one man in particular by setting aside time for the women in my life.

One day at the beginning of this month, I was sitting next to Luke on the bus and informed him that I had scheduled a date with one of my classmates for that Friday night. He registered what I said, but just sat and blinked at me for a few seconds, trying to reconcile his decently strong trust in me with my confession of infidelity.

Admittedly, I did intentionally phrase my announcement in a way that sounded much worse than my actual intention of doing homework with a girl in my Russian class in a coffee shop that Friday night. The reaction I received was similar to the one I anticipated, although it took him a little longer to process that I do actually refer to plans with a platonic girlfriend as a “date” unironically.

He luckily has come to terms with my dating life now, and I have since abandoned him on many a Friday night to make sure I still have women in my life.

I had a few dates with my roommate Sierra. Sierra is a friend that I have held on to since my freshman year at BYU, though I rarely spend time with her outside of the apartment. I’ve been doing better at that though, since we went to see her younger cousin’s high school production of Pride and Prejudice. Her cousin played Mr. Bingley. Of course, when I heard about this I felt an immediate need to experience a bunch of 14 to 18-year-olds speaking in fake British accents and trying to authentically convey Austen’s wit and nuanced social commentary.

It was also scheduled about a week or two after I introduced Luke to the Kiera Knightly version of the movie. He enjoyed Mr. Collins almost as much as I did, which I consider a success.

The play perfectly fulfilled my expectations, in that the scene transitions were abrupt and clunky, the acting ability diverse, and the accents sufficient to keep me on the edge of my seat. Plus plenty of backstage actors with their mics on at the wrong time. And I got to see Lizzy fall in love with Darcy and Mr. Collins be Mr. Collins (in the body of a twelve year old). It was the perfect evening.

It made me wonder what it would be like to sit in the audience as an objective observer of the high school productions I was a part of.

I’m okay with being left to wonder on that one.

As many of you probably don’t know, Maryland Day was this past Monday, the 25th. I’m bold enough to assume that you weren’t privy to this information because I had no idea the holiday existed until someone texted about it in the Maryland Club group chat. To celebrate, I (somewhat irresponsibly) baked a cake after school to share with my assigned family home evening (FHE) group. I also made a 12-question Kahoot in under 15 minutes, which, for those who don’t know, is pretty impressive.

No one in my FHE group cared that it was Maryland day (even after participated in my Kahoot) but they did seem to appreciate being fed cake, which is probably the real reason I made the cake.

A few people even told me that the cake reminded them of their mother’s chocolate cake. To those people: I hate to break it to you, but your mother’s special recipe is the first one that comes up when you type “chocolate cake recipe” into Google.

I’m starting to realize that I view baking as a simultaneously stress-relieving and productive activity, even though it is hardly ever necessary. I have been in the habit of baking bread every Sunday over the past two semesters, but in this last week alone I baked a batch of cookies, a loaf of braided bread, and a multi-layer chocolate cake, all because I felt like I wasn’t doing enough in other areas of my life.

The cookies, I baked with the intent of delivering to a few women in my congregation who I try to keep in touch with. My intentions were good, but I ended up being really busy the day that I made them and didn’t get the time to deliver them until a few days later, by which time the cookies were not really suitable to present to people I want to convince of my love for them.

Luckily, the women I wanted to give them to were at church today and don’t seem to hate me despite my failure to surprise them with unsolicited baked goods. And my roommates benefited from the cookies, so it wasn’t a waste.

The bread I’m pretty sure I only baked because I wasn’t in a good mental place to do homework and I knew that Easter Sunday would be too busy a day for me to spend a few hours waiting for dough to rise. Then, the chocolate cake I made because I felt the need to provide some opportunity for my friends to celebrate a day that nobody cares about (including me, if we’re being really honest with ourselves) and needed an incentive to get them there.

Even though it tends to lead me away from homework that I should be doing, I am grateful for baking, and I am grateful that it’s a skill that I find pleasure in developing. I’m hoping that it will serve me well sometime in the future.

As for skills that are a bit more obviously related to my life path right now, I have been practicing those as well! These skills are graded, though, so they’re a little more stressful.

I got back into the classroom over the past two months! I shadowed a seventh grade classroom every morning for a few weeks to fulfill a requirement for my Students with Disabilities class. One thing I realized about seventh graders: they are funny. For one thing, the girls are just starting to go through their growth spurts and to look like high school, while the boys still look like eleven-year-olds.

The most interesting thing to me about this English classroom was actually the teacher. She was so kind and interested in the well-being of her students. She apparently speaks Mandarin Chinese, but all of her slides had a Spanish translation on them for the benefit of the students whose first language was Spanish. She constantly praised me for the way I helped the students during independent work time, and seemed genuinely interested in helping me in whatever way she could.

For all of these reasons, I want to be like her when I have my own classroom.

There were some other things though that caught me off guard. For example, she would sometimes just define words incorrectly. Whether it was the vocabulary word of the day or a word that she off-the-cuff had to translate for students when it appeared in a reading, she would give definitions that were simply incorrect. “Prose” is not another word for “poetry”, for instance.

She and I also have different ideas about what makes something a metaphor instead of just pretty writing.

The funny thing that I’ve realized though is that I don’t really care. Of course, I want my students to understand what I teach them clearly and to learn correct terms and practices, but very few of those seventh graders are going to remember the exact line out of Poe’s “Annabelle Lee” and quote it as a metaphor because this teacher told them it was. What I’m realizing about education, at least middle school education, is that most students just need someone to be there.

Students don’t need teachers who know everything. They don’t need teachers who know the answers to every question. They mostly need teachers who know enough to teach them the basics so that they can inspire more questions and a greater desire to learn. I want to be a scholar, always learning and improving as a teacher, as a reader, and as a writer, but it’s also nice to know that I don’t really need to know everything. Because at the end of the day, it’s like one of my old professors taught us: “We teach students, not English.”

To show you that I am actually trying to learn how to teach English and not just completely giving up on the subject in favor of being a daycare supervisor for 12-year-olds, I want to talk a little bit about my Teaching English Grammar class. I LOVE this class. So much. It’s so fun. Especially since it promotes my throwing in sentence fragments here and there for stylistic effect, so long as the decision is purposeful.

The funny thing about grammar is that it and its rules are always changing. Even the English majors in my class who have been reading books for their entire lives are struggling to grasp sentence templates and how to recognize them in context. Our professor, who eats grammar up with a spoon, loves puzzling over sentence structure with us, which is perhaps my favorite part of the class.

The funny thing about linguists is that they have to be okay with ambiguity. When I took a grammar class two semesters ago, the professor would spend minutes of class staring at sentences that he wrote on the board, asking us to essentially vibe check the sentence. Claims like, “It just feels nouny to me,” were common, along with, “I’m not getting adjective from this, you know? I don’t think it’s an adjective in this context.”

We normally end up with a conclusion on what part of speech a word is, but with a little asterisk next to it that just means, “You know, probably.”

My current professor does the exact same thing, but in the most adorable way. She gets so excited about every little query and uncertainty. The other day, she asked a student, “What were you thinking [when you said this was an adjectival clause]?” The whole class burst out laughing, since this question sounds like the kind of thing our English teacher would say to a student who made an unfathomably ridiculous mistake, but our professor asked it with such sincerity to actually understand our reasoning.

She teaches me a lot through her enthusiasm and willingness to accept ambiguity, and I am grateful for her.

Since today is Easter, I do feel a need to also share my love and gratitude for my Savior. As I alluded to while describing my desperate baking exploits this week, I have been feeling a little incapable at times this week. It’s easy to feel like I’m not doing enough. There are responsibilities at work, school, in my relationship, at church, with my friends, everywhere. My mom always told me I was a bit of a perfectionist, which I never really believed until I typed out that last sentence just now. And perhaps a little bit while I was baking a chocolate cake.

But even while I’m feeling overwhelmed and tired and like there’s no possible way I can stay on top of everything, every time I think about my relationship with my Savior, Jesus Christ, I just feel a sense of love and a natural desire to rely more on Him.

Easter is a holiday that reminds me of how much I have to be grateful for. Not only does it occur in one of the most beautiful times of year, not only does it give me a reason to spend time with family and eat delicious food, but it gives me an excuse to reexamine my faith and my goals for my life. When those goals point me closer to God and towards being a kinder and less selfish person, I feel happy.

I also feel happy having my family, or whoever you are reading this, to share my life with. So thank you for loving me enough to want updates on my life.

I hope you have a great month; it’s going to be a good one.

Sophie