The Teachers Side of Parent-Teacher Conference - Stream of Conscience

I can't believe we have already been in school long enough for midterms and therefore Parent Teacher Conferences. I just spent the last 3 1/2 hours meeting parents and discussing the grades of their "little darlings". Although I am exhausted, I am actually pretty grateful for Parent-Teacher Conferences. It gives me a chance to talk up my good students and make them and their parents really happy, or to help my students who need to do a little work to improve.

Although, sometimes, like tonight I wonder if I am too nice. I want all of my students to succeed and often bend over backwards helping them to get there. With 200 students who should probably be learning the cruel rules of the real world, I should probably not help them SO MUCH. But it is a hard balance, because as a teacher, I feel it is my responsibility to know how they are doing and be there to tell them and help them when they need improvement.

I just can't escape my nature to people please. I want to please the student by helping them succeed. I want to please their parents, by bragging to them about how much their student has improved or how great they are. And I want to please, I guess, the administration by showing them that I am a good teacher and care about my students. In addition to being a people pleaser, I am afraid in my job I am a bit of a perfectionist. I cannot relax and even sleep if I know I haven't given my student every opportunity to succeed. This does not mean all my students pass with A+'s in my class. All it means is I often spend my lunches and after school helping students catch up on missing and absent work.


I guess I just feel that these students are at such a crucial stage in life. I can help determine whether or not they gain confidence in their ability to succeed and therefore set a standard for what they expect of themselves throughout high school and college (even if it is just for history). This is a huge responsibility. If they leave my class and know very little about history, I will be a little disappointed. But if they leave my class feeling like they are "bad" at history or "bad" at school I will feel like a total failure. How else can I boost this confidence if it is not through regularly knowing how they are doing in my class, giving words of encouragement and discussing their grades and behavior with their parents?

I guess I will keep doing what I am doing because I know it is right. :)

Pleasant Surprises

Yesterday, Monday the 15th of the year 2008, as I headed out from a long day of teaching joyful 13-year-olds about mountain men, explorers and colonization and hurried to meet my dear husband for a quick car swap before I headed to BYU to teach a group of college students about culture and lesson writing I was very pleasantly surprised. . .

Tyler and I have been happily married for 1 year, 9 months and 10 days. For 1 year, 9 months and 10 days we have also happily enjoyed driving everywhere together because we have shared a car. Sharing a car has been great. It has given us a lot of time together.
This April Tyler was hired by NY Life and by June he was working full time. Our happy little simple life, started to be not so simple anymore as we both worked full time in two different cities.

The struggle to get us both where we needed to be when we needed to be there while we still shared one car, was greatly alieviated by generous friends and family members. Thank you Heather and Kerstin for the many times you let us borrow your cars over the summer and to the countless others who have picked up, dropped off and given us rides.

Back to my surprised.

As I raced to Alpine Village to give Tyler the Mazda, who would give Kerstin her CR-V back and then rush me up to campus by 4:15 to teach, I found myself in the parking lot searching for Kerstin's CRV, which should have contained Tyler. As I quickly turned the Mazda around and speed dialed Tyler, a 2006 Hyundai Tuscon with a handsome man in a gray suit and a big smile on his face rounded the corner.

I quickly parked, jumped out of the car and gave Tyler a quick kiss as I checked out our new car. I absolutely loved it immediately. It is a small SUV with 4 wheel drive. It will be great for our sporting activities and, when the time comes, transporting children (this is not an announcement). It has an automatic transmission and is very easy to drive.

I was very pleasantly surprised :)

*The picture above is not of our actual car. It is dark now so I can't take pics. I post some later!

Back To School

So I started my second year of teaching last Monday, on August 18th. I have made it through 7 1/2 days of class to the moment, although my hopes of a smooth second year have been dashed so far. When I arrived on Monday I came to find that my 25 student class limit, had been surpassed to as many as 36. I only have 28 seats in my class so it has been rather uncomfortable for everyone the past 7 1/2 days. I started to hassle administration right away and got the run around for a while well everyone 'looked over numbers'. The solution to the problem is I am giving up on of my prep periods (the time of peace when I have no students) and will now be teaching 9 classes of 7th and 8th grade history, 4 on one day and 5 on the other. I am surprisingly not too worried about teaching all day without a prep. I feel really confident going into my second year and think I will be able to run my classroom smoother than last year. I do anticipate taking quite a bit of work home at night and over the weekends, but it will be worth it to have smaller classes, plus the extra pay for my prep. Well lunch is almost over and 7th graders are getting ready to stampeed my door down. Eeek! At least I have DMB concert to look forward to tonight! :)

Welcoming Audrey Emma into our Family

My sister finally had her baby yesterday after walking around for a week dialated to uncomfortable levels. The delivery went well and the baby is healthy, weighing 7 lbs 19oz. Here are a few pictures my sister-in-law sent us. We are so excited to meet our new little niece when we go home to California in a few weeks.

Italy Pictures...finally!

BUON GIORNO!

I am currently sitting in a beautiful hotel outside piazza Barberini, exhausted from a full day of Rome sight seeing and eating. We have not been in Italy for 8 days and still going strong. We arrived in Rome last Monday and got right on a train to Florence. In Florence we enjoyed the art of the Uffizi, Academia and Bargello. We also climbed Brunoleschi's dome and went on an awesome bike ride that took us to a wealthy suburb. At this point we got an excellent view of Florance and discvered a monastery where mass was going on. The monks sang it in Latin! It was beautiful.

From Florence we took a day trip to Siena which is a little city about an hour outside of Florance, famous for its seashell shape piazza and unique romanesqu cathedral. It was soo cool because Siena has this traditional horserace that goes back centuries. Each neighborhood has its own coat of arms and horse rider. One time a year the city fills the seashell piazza with sand along the edges and the neighborhoods race for bragging rights. The race went on the day before we came (we watched it on TV and it consisted of about 3 hours of build up for 45 seconds of racing. It was exciting though because a few people fell off their horses as they rounded this really tight corner and at the end, I swear people were trampled to death as they mobbed the winner. Being there the day after was awesome because we missed the thousands of people but were able to still get a really great feel for the race. The winning team was also all in renaissance attire parading through the streets with drums and banners, singing in all the other losing neighborhoods. It was quite exciting. I will post a bunch of pics when we are back in the states.

So I am getting tired now....but if you are up for it I will tell you about Sorrento.

Sorrento is a beach city south of Naples (where yes, the mafia is still very much alive and corrupt as they take taxes and use them on nice cars instead of picking up the garbage - it way stinks near naples). Sorrento is very beautiful and charming. It is known for its lemons and woodmaking. We shopped around and went to the beach in Sorrento. One day we rented a boat to go to Capri positano and possible Amalfi. Although on the boat ride a few people got sick and we did not make it as far as we planned. It was still beautiful and we got great tans (at least I did, the Ellis' burn!). It was amazing how terribly chopping the ocean got on our way back. They told us that two days before a cyclone had come out of no where and damage many boats. They told us one day before the boat ride that the ocean was calm 'like a lake'. HAHA crazy Italians! The next day, Sunday, we went to a town called Casa del mare for church. It was a branch of about 18 members and 4 missionaries. Church was probably my favorite part because everyone was so kind. Many of them spoke english because down in the south, tourism is the best way to earn money. We got names and numbers of missioanry families in the states so we can give them a call and tell them their missionary is well. It was also from these members that we learned a lot about the governmnet in Naples becuase Casa Del Mare was the stinkiest city I have ever been to. Apparently the trash has been a problem for 14 years because of the stupido mafia. Four months agothey started selling thier trash to the Germans who then sells it to the Swiss because the government would rather do that then buy an incinerater and the regions in Northern Italy wont help out their southern countrymen. I think that is ridiculous...but thus is Italy sometimes.

Monday we took a taxi to the train station in Naples only to find that our train, along with all other transportation, was on strike and we could not get anywhere until 9pm that night. So we called up our previous taxi drivr Vencenzo and asked him to take us all the way to Rome. Vencenzo was Tylers favorite part of the trip. For 3 hours he talked to us about everything from politics to mountain biking to cooking. We got some incredible tips on Italian cooking. Unfortunately it sounds like we may need to plant our own garden in order to ever create the deliciousness of Italian food. Vencenzo has started to create his own mountain biking tourist attraction where he takes groups around the Almalfi coast and even around Vesuvius. (yeah, the volcano that destroyed pompeii. Don't worry, its still active and ready to blow anytime Saint G----- I cant remember ---- but 3 times a year they take out the relic of this Saint G. The relic is a viale of his blood. If his blood does not turn to liquid form it means very bad things will happen in naples. Three times it did't liquify and that was WW2, the break out of cholera and when vesuvius erupted last in 1944. In semptember when the main ceremony of blood checking happens everyone is glued to their TVs and praying. Check your newspaper this september-it may be interesting.) So back to Vencenzo - he was awesome, constantly making jokes about his mother-in-law. Oh PS, did I tell you he looks like MOnk! He even walks the same. So we finally got to Rome with the help of Vencenzo and I am going to stop here because this has already been a long and exciting blog.

I am using a european computer and don't feel like editing-sorry for mistakes!

Love you all :)

p.s. This post is labeled 'buon giorno' in tribute to Tyler who has managed to use the phrase in the most comical stuations. Gotta love that kid.

What is the What?

I borrowed this book from Tyler's Aunt Sandy who is a bleeding heart biologist among many other wonderful things. I held onto it for a few weeks before it finally felt good to read. Once I started I could not stop and have been talking about it since I finished. The book is a pseudo-autobiography (pseudo meaning it was written from the perspective of Achak Deng, but because his English is not perfect Dave Eggers wrote his story) about a boy who was chased from his village in the Sudan at age 7. From then until he made it to the United States in his early 20s he join thousands of young boys and other refugees cross the Sudan desert into Ethiopia and then to Kenya. The book was so enlightening to me because I had no idea what really was going on in the Sudan and Darfur beyond what I piece together from the news and the Hotel Rawanda movie. I also had little idea of what living in a refugee camp was like. The book was also really well written and made you think about who we are as Americans. I highly recommend it.

Well this will probably be the last post for a while unless I can get on from Italy. We leave tomorrow :)