Nothing that is broken can not be made new

One of my kids made these at home- you take old broken crayons and put them in a muffin tin or some other mold, then melt them in the oven. It makes cool multicolor crayons!

Upon a star

I wish I could take a picture of a song, or an emotion, but these things are much more difficult to capture.

Good day, sunshine

Simon Cowell would probably say this is "indulgent" but oh well. Vitamin D is good for the soul.

It's a brand new day

The sun was shining on and making all these neat colors/shadows on the snow this morning.

Mo' money, mo' problems

I resolved this year to keep a budget via the envelope system and using cash vs. plastic. So far, so good :)

Lesson One

God loves me. God likes me. (And he's pretty crazy about you, too!)

I know it don't make sense to those who ride the fence

Insert clever title here

To Haiti From Elgin With Love

Last Saturday, the Salvation army in Elgin packed 1,040,920 meals for Haitian earthquake survivors.

Rainbow Fish

We read The Rainbow Fish today and the kids made these with watercolors. They did a really nice job :) For a moment, I felt like the teacher I want to be, happy as the kids are busy working and engaged, amazed over how the water changes colors as they rinse off their brushes in it.

Big rims left side? FAIL

When life gives you dead roses, make potpurri

I think it is terribly hard for me to do anything consistently. As an emotionally driven person, so much depends on the mood I am in.

Some days I feel like taking 20 pictures. Some days I feel compelled to write poems. Some days I want to write out quotes or make a photo collage. Some days I want to read 100 pages of a book and sometimes I am excited to dig into my Bible. Other days I just want to crawl into bed and cry or take a bath or waste time online and do nothing productive. And then some days I want to blog (rant? vent?) about my life as a teacher.

~

I brought some work to do while the kids were in library and the kids watched me in fascination as I cut shapes out of construction paper, repeatedly asking "what are you doing?"

I attempted to talk with (lecture) my classes today about the importance of being respectful, as I seem to continue to struggle with classroom management. (It doesn't help to be told  I am not needed, as well as that I suck at what I do on top of the fact that my students constantly try to assert their own authority/power/control over my classroom). My students, however, were much  more interested in telling me about how over the weekend they lost a tooth or threw up or went to the arcade. 

During writing, one of my students was casually singing "save a horse, ride a cowboy"

Apparently today is my birthday, as one of my students made me a card and continually wished me a happy birthday despite my telling him my birthday was in September.

After school, 10 or so teachers sat in a freezing cold classroom in tiny chairs eating junky snacks and discussing how starting in Kindergarten we should basically "teach to the test" (the ISAT)

Oh the joys of teaching Kindergarten. You have to celebrate the small victories I suppose.

One of my most challenging and "low" students zipped his own coat today. And another "low" one wrote the sentence "I love Mom" all by himself :)

Who new vitamins could be so delicious?

1, 2, skip a few

So I missed a lot of days... I tried to make up for it by taking extra today.

I present: a drive through Elgin

There are a lot of weird small businesses in Elgin... I wonder who shops at them

  

  

  

  

 Ahh, the casino

  

  

  

 Greater things are still to be done in this city!!

  

  

 The End

 

A rose by any other name

 

 

My funny Valentines

How the school district makes me feel

Dear Teacher,

Thank you for giving 110% of yourself to your job. Thank you for coming in early to set up your classroom and lesson plans for the day. Thank you for staying after school to tutor struggling students or lead extracurricular clubs and events to enrich students’ lives. Thank you for coming in on your days off even though you know full well you won’t be paid for it. Thank you for dragging home children’s books, piles of papers to grade, lamination and crafts to cut, etc. and persuading your loving family to help you with numerous school projects on evenings and weekends. Thank you for writing sub plans when you are deathly ill and coming in anyway when you feel crappy. Thank you for being exposed to billions of little germs on dirty hands and snotty noses and sneezes that do not get covered. Thank you for spending your paycheck on dry erase markers, glue sticks, hand sanitizer, stickers, prizes, posters and countless supplies from specialty (expensive) teacher stores. Thank you for attending meetings, professional development and advancing your degree over holiday breaks. Thank you for putting up with overprotective, ornery, permissive, inattentive, hovering, angry and at times wonderfully helpful parents. Thank you for wearing numerous hats and making countless decisions every day- you are a social worker, nurse, public relations officer, performer, actor, diplomat, and a mom to 20-40 children every day who constantly demand your attention and request your guidance.

We realize that most of the world thinks you have it easy. Those who can’t, teach, right? We recognize that people commonly assume teachers work 8-2 September-May and “isn’t it fun to be with kids all day?” We would like to recognize your accomplishments, and the fact that most people could not survive 1 day doing what you do every day.

However, we would like to clearly make it known that all of your dedication amounts to nothing more than a statistic. We have been looking at our test scores from last year (poor performance is your fault by the way) and our enrollment for next year. Because after all, the lives of children who will be our nation’s future are nothing but numbers to us. Numbers followed by dollar signs, all in red (their test scores are red too). Therefore, we would like to inform you that you are not needed here. We may or may not feel the need to call you up on an arbitrary day (while you are teaching) sometime within the next 7 months and offer you a random job out of nowhere that you must take otherwise you have officially resigned from our district and we will promptly disown you. “You teach preschool? Now you can go teach 8^th grade math. It’ll be fine; all teaching is basically the same right?”  Never mind the fact that it takes 3 good years to get proficient at teaching one grade level/subject area. (Imagine if we did this to doctors. Foot doctor, you are fired, now go do heart surgery…) We can get away with this because we know at the heart of it you care about children’s futures, and society needs teachers, as much as we like to pretend we don’t.

Now go back in there and do it all over again tomorrow.

Sincerely,

               Your employers

                              The school district

When February rolls around, I'll roll my eyes...