A life in progress

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 ...

I haven't written anything for quite a while.  Largely, that's because I spent the past (almost year) focusing on finishing law school, graduating, and passing the bar.  Fortunately for me (and my husband), I did all of those things.  Yay me! However, I've had a lot on my mind lately and I decided it was time to let it all out. **warning - this is kind of long and ranty and mild profanity does appear in this post** I'm going to vote tomorrow morning.  I like voting.  It makes me feel like I'm a part of something bigger than myself.  Nevada, fortunately, has early voting, which means I can go to the mall, get a corndog, and vote with very little fuss.  Voting on actual election day is kind of a pain, and I like this 21st century mall-based system I live in. Like most people, I'm not shy about who I'm voting for in the election. Over the past year, I've had mixed anxiety levels about a "President Trump" world.  Fortunately, as of ...

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 posted last week about our first adventure(s) in foster care and a lot of people have been asking me "what's next" or "what now."  So, I thought it was probably time for an update.  It's been a difficult decision, and one we haven't taken lightly, so we've spent a lot of time deciding what was right for us and for future foster children. Our experience with J and Baby P taught us a couple of things: 1.  We are NOT prepared for this.  It's kind of like your first teaching job.  You were a student teacher, you took all the classes and wrote all the papers, have some lesson plans prepared and all sorts of stuff, but then the first day of class arrives and you realize you have a lot of book smarts, but zero idea of what you're doing. Even though all of our friends have been so amazing (a special shout out here to Val, who was a total lifesaver in more ways than one), and so giving, we found ourselves at a loss.  At one point, I had ba...

2014 is winding to a close, and everyone is making  Facebook year in review  slideshows.  It's really kind of an awesome concept.  Facebook has chosen some random photo albums, posts and pictures from the year and turned them into a little presentation.  In creating and watching mine (which I've since watched a dozen times), I realized how awesome my year was! While the year is not quite over yet -- and knowing me, things could go crazy in the next 8 days, I thought I'd take a few minutes to be thankful for the amazing year I had.  It's sort of like Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years all rolled into one... talk about crazy. Of course, I am thankful for my wonderful husband.  We had an amazing year together & I am ever-grateful that I found him.  The adventures we had this year were unparalleled and something I never could have come up with in my wildest dreams.  While the year started on sort of a sour note (failed IVF), it only...