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. 😉
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.
<3
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