A life in progress

A few days ago, I got in my first ever Twitter scuffle (I won't call it an all-out Twitter war, because let's be honest, I'm not that important) with a local journalist.  He wrote about the contract dispute between the teachers and the local school district, blaming teachers and labor unions for the school district's budgetary problems.  I disagreed.  A lot.  I also felt the facts he used in his article were misleading, and in some places outright incorrect.  So I responded to him directly and wrote a fairly lengthy blog post airing my opinion. OMG!  Kermit is using the wrong your/you're! If you haven't read the first part of this post, it's fairly lengthy.  In short, I talk about how teachers are educated professionals that deserve to be treated with respect and deserve to be paid a reasonable salary.  Eventually, teachers leave the profession for lack of money. I shared it on social media and got quite a bit of feedback - much more th...

Today, my local newspaper published an article blaming teachers for the shortcomings of our schools.    Not teachers' skills,  or dedication, or knowledge in their subject areas, but their paychecks.  Basically, the TL;DR version of the article, and to be very honest, there's no actual reason to read the article because the "journalist" (and I use the term very loosely) just made up a lot of crap, is that the school district is having massive financial problems (true) which is a direct result of teachers fighting for pay raises. So. Yeah. Let me just start with some basic facts, because this is not going to be pretty. I started teaching in 2007.  My base salary was just under $30,000.00 per year in a large urban area.  I made so little money that as a single person, I qualified for county housing assistance for two years. Let that sink in for a moment. I was a full time teacher.  The county subsidized my housing.  More amazing...

Yesterday, I used this sad llama to show how I felt about leaving my students Today... I don't know... I have to try to find a sadder llama.  I don't know if there's a better embodiment of my heartbreak than Kuzco sitting in the rain as a sad llama. Maybe a sad elephant. Yeah - just imagine the saddest thing ever.  If you aren't crying - here's a  BuzzFeed article  to help start the tears.  Read that and then come back to me. Ok?  Are you crying now?  Because I am.  I didn't even have to reread that article.  Just finding the link made me a little misty.  Don't judge.  It's been a rough day. Today started like any other normal day.  Actually, it started earlier than most normal days because I had to get all my grades finalized so I went in early. Before school even started, my neighbor came in to give me goodbye treats.  They were amazing and I ate way to many of them.  Again - this is a no judging ...

Today has been absolutely heart wrenching. I saw half of my students for the last time - since my school is on a block schedule, I only see my students every other day, making today the last time I will see many of them. That also makes today the first real slap-in-the-face reality of leaving the classroom.  I have been a teacher for 10 years, plus some student teaching and that weird year in China, so... let's call it 12 - which is the same age as many of my students.  I have been a teacher since before most of my students could walk, or talk.  To them, it is a lifetime. And I guess in many ways, it's a lifetime for me, too. For the past ten years, I have woken up every day and gone into a room of young people where I was expected to be the smartest person in there -- or at least the one that knew what was going on... Usually that was the case... However, that wasn't always how it went. Teaching is much harder than I ever thought it would ...

Yesterday was another of our staff development days.  Typically I'm not a huge fan.  Staff development is typically one of those things that sound like a fantastic idea but at the end of the day teachers leave feeling like their soul has been sucked out through their nose. For the past few staff development days, I've actually been teaching sessions to get out of the rut.  It's slightly better, but I can see glazed looks on participants' faces and I know how they feel.  I try to make things relevant.  And I try to make my attendees understand that I am giving them information that I truly believe that they can take back to their classroom to use, but at the end of the day, I know they feel the same soul suck that I often felt. However, yesterday was a little different.  My principal bucked trend a little bit and instead of giving us another training on the Nevada performance framework (again), he brought in a motivational speaker who specialized in ...

This afternoon, I went into my principal's office for a moment to ask a routine question about a student.  We chit-chatted for a couple minutes and then he gave this dramatic sigh like I'd never heard come from him before and handed me a couple of pages stapled together.  I had no idea what was happening, but I took the pages and started reading. The first was a student ID photo with some basic information -- printed out from our student information system.  While this was not my  student, I was aware of him.  We are a very small school with a dozen teachers and one administrator; everyone knows everyone - literally.  At times we have as few as 25 students on campus.  This particular student had recently completed our program and returned to a comprehensive high school, but recently enough that the name and face was still familiar. The second page was a news article giving some sketchy details of a murder.  I'm sure pretty much everyone can se...

I have just finished my second week student-lawyering at the county PD office.  A lot of people have been asking me what it's like, or if I still want to be a lawyer (like this would be the best time to decide I didn't).  Since the past few days have been particularly emotional for me, I'll give a general overview of the experience. In some ways, working for the PD has some of the same elements as working in a behavior school.  I come in constant contact with the criminal element that's brilliant enough to get caught for some reason or another.  Most of the people I see are arrested or cited on rather minor charges -- possession of drugs, solicitation of prostitution, petty theft (shoplifting), and other relatively minor charges.  Part of me is amazed that this is what our local law enforcement focuses their time and energy on.  Are drugs and prostitution illegal?  Yes.  Is it worth thousands of dollars to arrest, prosecute, and jail each ind...

Today, I am linking up with Jen from  Ramblings of a Suburban Mom  again for her Thursday Thoughts. I actually started this blog post last week.  It was my birthday (FYI, I am old now) and I was doing a lot of very un-birthday like things... I feel like I spent the bulk of the day cleaning up baby poop and chasing after 8th graders. But, for some reason, I didn't finish the post.  It just sat here.  I probably got distracted cleaning up more baby poop or chasing after some more 8th graders. In the past week, things have actually settled down somewhat in the baby poop department.  We're giving Baby C less milk, so she's calmed down a lot.  8th graders, on the other hand, are a terrible population of people in general, and in the past week, they've only gotten worse.  (If, for some reason, you are an 8th grader reading my blog, I have a couple of things to say.  Firstly, you might want to consider some more age-appropriate reading ma...

I'm linking up with Jen from  Ramblings of a Suburban Mom  this week for "Thursday Thoughts."  This is really no different from my normal ramblings, except maybe I'll get a wider audience.  :) I'm not sure what it is about mid-February, but my students always start behaving like insane people.  It's like they suddenly realized they just had their long vacation for the year and spring break is a little while off.  As I'm already in a behavior school, this amplifies the situation a little bit.  Spring restlessness can turn into all out chaos. Over the past couple of weeks, the TimeHop app (which I LOVE) has been reminding me of some of my annual spring insanity.  Since I haven't posted them all to Facebook, here's a small sampling. -- The kid that got upset and threw a desk at me.  This one really doesn't require a lot of explaining. -- The entire classroom full of students (about six kids total) that lost their indoor privileg...

In the past few weeks, I've had a few students tell me they wanted to go to law school & a few current college students tell me they were registered/taking/hoping to take the LSAT.  Mostly, I just smiled and said "that's great!" or something similar while deep down I was thinking "are you sure you want to do that to yourself?" As the semester is barely two weeks old, and I have a pretty light load this spring, law school feels like a totally realistic endeavor.  Friends see that I'm sleeping and eating regularly, having date nights and Disneyland marathon weekends with Mike and think this is the law school experience. I will admit, this year has been pretty good.  I spent the summer in Europe "learning" about international legal concepts and visiting some amazing places.  Then fall the first semester in the past 3 years that I've felt I've actually had time to breathe.... and exercise.  This spring is looking to have a simila...

This was me today.  Well, sort of.  I don't have incredible hair or $1000 shoes.  But what I did seem to have was an unending stream of frustrations that led me to a less-than-stellar day of teaching. Everyone has bad days at work.  Doctors, lawyers, fast food workers, everyone.  Entire literary and comedy careers have been built upon the simple concept of a really bad day. (this by the way, was also me) My day was no worse than anyone else's bad day.  Ironically, my husband also had a pretty rough go of it today.  Some parents complained about a new teaching method he was trying out & rather than allow him to explain, his administration told him that it was probably just better to go back to the old way.  He hadn't done anything remotely wrong, he just wanted to try something different. I, on the other hand, had one of those days.  It started too early because of a scheduled before-school training, which I never lik...