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Sometimes, Life Gets a Little Busy…

  • Posted on April 1, 2013 at 5:36 pm

It’s been over a year since I posted anything.  I write whole blog posts in my head, but when I actually have the time to sit down and write, I end up doing other things.

Gracie is almost three years old now.  For 2013, I decided to take a picture of her every day.  I was planning on posting a monthly grouping of pictures here, but haven’t even gotten around to doing that.  But, I want to… and I will.  She went up to stay with grandma for almost a week, so I’ll have to cheat a little when it comes to her pictures, since I don’t think grandma and grandpa took any pictures of her each day.

I’ve had a lot of stress in my life, too.  I teach high school students and coach a swim team.  I love coaching my swim team, even if it is a lot of work, but lately, I’ve been finding myself wondering more and more if teaching is really what I should be doing with my life.  I’m stressed out more days than not and have no desire to really care as much as I used to.  I can’t be an effective teacher to my students if the district thinks it’s OK to shove 44 students into one room.  How am I to be effective to them when there are that many students?  Not only that, but the pressure from the district to hold teachers accountable for student achievement on tests is frightening.  I have several students who are failing all their classes and have been for years.   Their failure will now be a part of my evaluation.  Not only that, but state testing has become the norm and all we do is teach students to take a test.  Forget reading literature, learning how to write research papers, or how to analyze poetry.  It’s all drill and kill now… teach to a test.  What kind of education is that?  And, the icing on the cake, so to speak, is that most students aren’t ready for college-level writing when they get there.  Why?  I don’t have the time to teach them writing like I used to.  Why?  Because the district has been chomping at the bit to reconstitute our school and to keep them at bay, we wrote up a plan to show them we were trying to fix what was wrong.  In the plan, we’re expected to teach an extra class with the same amount of pay, with a ridiculously wacky schedule.  Every day, I have to mentally prepare for an hour-long class in the morning, and then after an eight minute passing period, I have a block-scheduled class come in.  I do that four times a week.  It’s insane.  It makes my head  hurt just thinking about it.  I am constantly running out of time with the curriculum I used to teach.

Maybe I should just stick to posting pictures of my daughter.  She’s cuter, anyway.  😉

2013-03-30 15.04.40

I don’t know of anyone who even reads this blog anymore, so if I start writing about my dad, I hope people don’t mind.  I need to get things off my chest about him, too.  If anything, I wish my dad wasn’t such a manipulative, narcissistic, and “it’s all about me” kind of person.  He has missed the last two years of my daughter’s young life because of his behavior.  It just saddens me.  I feel like an orphan a lot of the time.

Gotta go pick up the munchkin.

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