Okay, seriously?

Today? Of all the days in the week...in the year...why today?

Oh, my life! It is wonderful and amazing, but complicated! Huh. I should never have challenged the year 2010, because it's giving me a run for my money. These chapters in TSY are going to be awesome! Please stay tuned for any further developments.

Just trust me.

I have been cogitating a lot recently on my life and, more specifically, issues I have with trust. Obviously my blog is no place to bare my soul, so I will not. But I will divulge just a smidgen (ha...fun word) of information.

I have a hard time trusting new people. This is a problem, because it means that I am hard to read and fickle. It's just hard. It's hard giving away all your thoughts, feelings, and emotions and putting them out in the open to be laughed at or rained on, or to eventually be discarded.

Like...I trusted you with my feelings. Now that you're gone, what happened to those thoughts I gave you? Did they float away on the breeze? Is someone going to find them? Will I get an email from the BYU lost and found? Those were personal. If I had known you would, one day, cease to appreciate all I had given you...I wouldn't have given it away in the first place.

Anyway. I realized yesterday that this is why I hold on to things. Because there are some things and people in my life that, from my limited knowledge and experience, I am fairly certain I can trust. I just want to hold onto them because trust has already been established--I don't have to work for that again.

But maybe that isn't right anymore. Maybe it's time to move on, grow, and stretch as I learn to trust. Growing pains-that's all this is.

I feel like I should have realized this sooner. But now we're down to the wire.

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.