It's picked the worst time.

Life is fine, life is good-especially mine, which is just as it should be.

Work

I guess I finally caught the babe's cold. Blaaaah. Well, I'd guess I'd rather have the babe's cold than the ChemE's flu or whatever.

Oh yeah, and the other day in my music class we were talking about finding the beat of songs and stuff like that. Brother Jaccard was having us sing random songs like "Are You Sleeping?" and "My Country 'tis of Thee". He announced that the next song would be "This Old Man". Everyone started singing kind of awkwardly because I guess they didn't know the words? Luckily I know every last thing that old man played because I sing "This Old Man" at least once a day.

The truth is...

The truth is that I'm wearing pajamas and my new Land's End shoes (LOVE them), eating cinnamon bears, writing an essay, and trying to figure out my life. It's definitely attractive. The life of a single college student=glamorous!

When I was a girl, I had a favorite story.

"And now I stand here, starry eyed and stormy. Oh, just when I thought my heart was finally numb a beautiful young man appears before me, singing, "Come...oh, won't you come?" And what can I do if finally, for the first time, the one I'm burning for returns the glow? If love has come at last it's picked the worst time. Still I know...I've got to go.

Fly away, meadowlark. Fly away in the silver morning. If I stay, I'll grow to curse the dark. So it's off where the days won't bind me. I know I leave wounds behind me but I won't let tomorrow find me back this way. Before my past once again can blind me...fly away. And we won't wait to say goodbye, my beautiful young man and I."

Talk radio

Now that I have joined the ranks of the commuters, I feel like I'm an adult. I even listen to talk radio all the time now, and yes I love it. I think Doug Wright is awesome! KSL Newsradio 1160 really has become my favorite pre-set. Haha.

Anyway, the other day I turned on the radio at night and the man (not my beloved Doug Wright) was talking about teachers. In a gist, these were his comments. "Teachers do so much more than we give them credit for. They are overworked and under appreciated." Now, I was so happy he was saying this. I was like, Yes! Good, stand up for us! but he then went on to say "This is exactly why we need to link teacher's salaries to their success rate. We need to have a way to compensate the teacher's with high test scores and punish those who aren't performing well."

Okay, I've known this is a big issue for a long time, but this did not make me happy. There is absolutely NO way you should be compensating a teacher based on standardized test scores. Not all children in your classroom, no matter how effectively you teach, will receive "adequate scores" as outlined by the government.

Let's say, for example, that a teacher has many students for whom English is their second language. They may progress leaps and bounds past where they began in the course of a school year, but chances are they won't score as high as native English speakers. Test scores, then, would indicate the teacher is not a "good" teacher, since the whole class isn't in the exact same place.

So the government is going to punish me for being an ESL specialist? Because I have an ESL endorsement, I may have many ELLs in my classroom. Even if I do my best and help them progress past their initial level, my salary will be lower than teachers with a classroom composed mainly of native English speakers and "gifted" children.

It just doesn't make sense, and I haven't even touched on alternate assessments yet, which is something else to consider. If the salary needs to be linked to something, link it to how much students progress through the year, not on their final test scores.

How can I jump on the bandwagon and kill this idea?

Confused?

Join the darn club.

1st Semester

Well, so far the "Arts Semester" has been...weird. Like, a lot of random busy work? I don't know, it's not really my style. I like my PE class because I feel like we're actually learning really practical things about how to teach but the other classes are just kinda vague, like integrate the arts! Okay. Anyway, this week for VAEDU we have to do 5 crayon processes. I am not crafty, or creative. The hardest part is actually coming up with something to draw. We're supposed to be drawing things that somehow connect to us, so I turned to the pictures on my phone for help. This is what my latest crayon process turned out to be (the process is "stained glass"-that's why there are lots of random, dark lines and awkward colors everywhere). I'm just proud that I actually created something.

The Inspiration

The Interpretation

The truth

So, my teaching partner and I taught our first day of PE yesterday. We were very nervous because1. we have never taught a full lesson before and 2. we had to teach Kindegarten. Yes, you heard me right...kindegarten! I am not an Early Childhood Education major. I never imagined that I would have to teach these youngsters.

So anyway, we got to the school, set up our Rules/Consequences, Time Out, and Circuit Training signs, and then the class arrived. At first I was terrified and had no idea what I was saying, but after a few minutes I just fell right into the teaching routine and it went really smoothly (I think).

The kids were great. It was surprising to me how enthusiastic they all were because, as a jaded college student, I don't really get excited about class. Especially not PE class. But they were so happy.

One little girl kept running across the gym every time I called out "Toe to Toe!" because she wanted to be my partner. At one point she just reached up for a hug...it was really cute. I only had to give one girl a reminder, and later I had to send the same girl to time out. Hopefully she will get better at following rules.

But I wanted to share a bit of honesty. I was demonstrating the hula hoop station, and told the kids that if they didn't know how to hula hoop they could jump rope with it, or spin it around their arm. Then...

Me: "If you can't do it around your waist, try spinning it on your arm like this..." and the hula hoop promptly flew off my arm. "Yeah...just like that."
Ezra: "Um, yeah...you're not very good at that."

Um, nope. Thanks kid.