Before we start into Way Back Wednesdays let me just say that today is the very last day you can VOTE (August 31st...in case you are reading this later :) ). So please vote today!!! School starts back next week and hopefully that means fall weather will be right behind the corner. We have had warm temps as of late, though we did just get two days of cooler weather...yay! I like the intro that came with it as well, so I kept that too. Teaching, as you know, is often a thankless job. Randomly you might get an atta girl thrown at you but other than that you don't get a lot of positive feedback. Unless of course, “I hate homework” is positive feedback. So when I started to get comments on my blog I was just giddy. Wow, positive feedback...and the actual day I post. But sadly there is some feedback I never get and wish I would. You might be surprised at the amount of email I answer a day. Sometimes I am even surprised. I always try and help when I can and I try and be honest … [Read more...]
Life is…
When I taught middle school, above my desk was a sign that read “Life is ten percent of what happens to you and 90% how you react to it”. Truer words could not be spoken. Far too often people feel victimized about what has been done to them. My friends C and T got stuck once in Omaha due to weather. They were supposed to be getting on to a connecting flight to Florida to go on a cruise. T (the wife) freaked out. Calling and having what C described as a melt down and tantrum because the world was against her. Well, Mother Nature might have been but not the world. C on the other hand told T this was an opportunity to explore a place they had never been to. C had once been offered a job in Omaha and turned it down, always wondering if he should have taken it or not. After spending the day there, he was quite happy in his decision to not move there. But without the opportunity he never would have known. They caught a plane the next day, and then another plane that flew them to the … [Read more...]
Special Project…
I got a tug on the arm. Fellow teacher and friend Mrs. L dragged me off to the side of the building and said “D just told me to go meet him in the parking lot. You’re coming with. He won’t kill you, he likes you.” D was one of our students. A student that one may like to say made poor choices. Sadly because he made poor choices he never got placed on the advanced math track, which he should have been. In all my years of teaching math, he was by far the most gifted at it. Everything came naturally to him. Which in a way was good, but in a way was bad. Math was the only subject he liked; he skated by with a D in just about every other class. Not because he couldn’t do it, just because that took effort and he was lazy (yes, I said he was lazy, deal with it). Since math came natural to him, it took no effort. Though I was amazed by his math talents, he was in every form a huge pain in the butt, and that was in the class he liked. Imagine him in the classes he didn’t like. … [Read more...]
Snap shot of your day….
In Arizona, at least the districts I worked at, the teachers had to do the duties: Morning playground duty, bus duty, lunch duty, afterschool duty, and after school bus duty. Which for the record blows. So many parents come to you at this time and want to ask questions and you can’t answer them because you have duty. Of course I usually just told the parent to walk and talk with me, but some didn’t want to. Nor did they want to stand in 112F weather for afternoon duty for 15 minutes…wimps. :) But playground duty in the morning was my favorite. It was my favorite for the fact that it was all age kids, so you got to interact with students you might not ever see normally. They older kids at K-8 schools are usually way in the back…they like to hide us, for good reason. :P One day a fourth grader comes up to me looking a little down. Normally the kids who came up to you were the ones with few friends. His one and only friend at school wasn’t coming to school that day so he had … [Read more...]
