A life in progress

I haven't posted anything in quite some time.  But, it turns out I have some free time these days. Like everyone else in America - and it seems the world - we are affected by the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak.  Last night, Nevada followed the examples of New York, New Jersey, Washington, and other states announcing immediate closure of all non-essential businesses for the next 30 days .  Prior to that, some businesses had voluntarily closed or reduced hours, including some of the largest casinos in the world - all MGM properties on the Las Vegas Strip . So, this is weird.  I mean, it is weird everywhere, but it particularly weird in Las Vegas.  We are literally the city that never closes.  Before today (or maybe more accurately, before Sunday when things started shutting down), I could go out at any time of the day or night and find someone to serve me a five-star meal, find a shop that would sell me a Rolex, or purchase a luxury car.  Some might...

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...

I haven't been able to spend a lot of time blogging lately.  Mostly, that's because I spend all of my time lawyer-ing, which involves an absurd amount of writing.  Writing for fun after writing for work just wasn't working out for me. However, now that things are settling down a little bit, I can sit down and write a little bit about the new world of lawyer-life that I've found myself in.  Since the world is obsessed with this idea of "the first 100 days," and I've been an attorney for 100-ish days, it seems like a good time. Since I've transitioned from teacher to lawyer, people have a lot of questions...  Ok, maybe not that question.. I'm going to try to answer some of them..... 1.  Do you like being a lawyer? A: Generally speaking, yes.  Sometimes it is hard -- actually difficult.  While I'm not doing anything physically exhausting, I am expending a lot of mental energy.  I have to stay focused and I have to keep...

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 not done any blogging lately, because as most teachers will tell you, May is terrible. Most of May is a lot like that purple one.  As a teacher, especially as a teacher in an alternative school, you become frazzled and exhausted.  I have literally come home and napped for hours at a time out of sheer exhaustion.  Students are panicking because they haven't completed any of their work for the past 6 weeks and suddenly they need enough points to get course credit for the semester.  They are needy and desperate.  I do my best to be helpful and supportive, but it is wearing.   I mostly finished what is essentially my last academic semester in law school in late April, so I've been able to focus on my students and their needs, but now law school is picking up again, so I will once again have divided interests.  Part of me will need to focus on my students, while the rest of me will focus on my studies. Despite all of this crazy, Mike a...

I don't have much to say today, as I'm completely exhausted from a hellacious week at work... but I wanted to post one last time before I wandered off this side of the globe. In 12 hours, Mike and I will be sitting in the Las Vegas airport waiting for our flight to San Francisco, which will then lead us to a flight to China!  Woo!  China! This is my excited face!  I'm going to do a combination of being an insane tourist and seeing all of the awesome stuff that China has to offer, and relaxing and getting a lot of massages.  Massages are cheap and unlike in the US aren't often confused as a method of prostitution... don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are plenty of "happy ending" massage parlors to be found, but the general idea is if you want a massage, it's because your back or feet are sore.  :) After this week, if I wasn't going to China, I would just dig a hole and hide for the next 10 days.  My students have been absolutely insane ...

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...

Today, like most other days, CPS placement workers called me three separate times to ask me if Mike and I would be willing to take physical custody of various foster children.  I know there was a 6 month old boy, but I didn't speak to the other two workers, so I'm not sure who the other two children were.  On average, I get 2-3 calls per day, every day.  We have a happy home and and empty bed, so we are a CPS worker's dream.  For 12 hours a day, placement workers are trying to find healthy, happy, homes for children that are brought into care for a couple of different reasons. Some children need what's called an "initial placement".  They are brought into CPS care from their parent or guardian's home, and now need somewhere to go.  If they don't find the child(ren) a home within the first 24 hours, they technically become a ward of the state, which is a legal conundrum for a number of reasons -- it's much easier if they find a foster parent withi...

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...