Wow, I'm Bad at This

Wow, I am bad at this whole blogging thing! At least now I have an excuse for being behind. The excuse is called Student Teaching. It runs my life right now. I am teaching 7th and 8th grade English at Pleasant Grove Junior High. My 7th grade classes are both ESL/Integrated English/Read 180, which was a bit of a surprise my first day. I don't have a whole lot of ESL experience, but it has been fun. I am definitely learning a lot about classroom management and getting plenty of management practice, but in a way I'm kind of glad. My days would be really boring without some the chaos that must be expected when you spend hours in a classroom with 12-14 year old kids. There have been a few frustrating days, but there have been even more fun and successful days. A few of my students can be really obnoxious and difficult to deal with when they constantly disrupt my class, but at the same time, they can be absolutely hilarious and sometimes I just have to laugh at their creative jokes and stories. I am amazed by the things they can come up with on a daily basis. I especially love their excuses and tricks they try to use to get out of doing their work in class.

We had an exciting day a week ago. One of my students went to use the bathroom and came right back to tell me that one of the toilets was on fire! I'm still not sure how that one was pulled off or who did it, but it created some excitement for a couple of days!

My biggest challenge/fear is having confidence in my own skills. I hate being watched/judged so every time I teach a lesson I am terrified that I am teaching something incorrectly and giving the students false information that Mrs. Schow is going to have to correct, but I am slowly becoming more and more confident as I spend more time in the classroom. Mrs. Schow (my cooperating teacher) has been teaching for over twenty years, so everything comes naturally and easily to her. I, on the other hand, have to plan out every minute of every lesson in detail before I teach.

I have been teaching for a few weeks now, which means I have about ten weeks to go. Wish me luck!

Last week we went to Disneyland for two days and then on a cruise to Catalina Island and Ensenada, Mexico. My mom, Paige, Cody, Alexis, me, Kristie, Bryant, Tyler, Rachelle, Stacia, Cooper, JJ, Ashley, Carla, Adrian, Ruth, and Grandma all went. It was tons of fun! We flew , which was sooooo much better than driving. We talked Ruth into going on all the rides at Disneyland and Cali Adventure. After California Screamin, she screamed "that was awesome!" and raved about how fun the ride was for hours lol. She also swore really loud on Tower of Terror when the lights went out and the elevator doors closed. It was hilarious. l was surprised by how much she and my aunt Carla loved all the rides! When we got on the ship, we found that all the couples had rooms with bunk beds while all the single people were in rooms with twin beds that slid together to make a bigger bed. How ironic is that? I thought it was pretty funny. Catalina was pretty fun. Part of our group went parasailing and they loved it. I wanted to go, but there was no way I was forkin over $80 to do it!

In Ensenada we took a fun tour to La Bufadora. It's one of three blowholes in the world, and supposedly it is the largest of the three. I have now seen two--Mexico and Hawaii. At La Bufadora there was a really cool restaurant, Habana Banana, that was built like a tree house. I loved it. There were also tons of really fun little shops where we bought lots of fun stuff.

I was actually pretty brave (for me) at dinner on the ship. I never ordered anything weird myself, but I tasted everything that everybody else ordered. I know it's crazy, but I tried crap, lobster, and salmon for the first time! I also tried this yummy pumpkin soup that I wish I would have ordered because it was DELICIOUS!

There was a really fun piano bar on the ship and in the first video, we are singing along during Name That Tune--which we totally won! They gave us six trophies for winning lol. We sat in the bar and sang along for hours almost every night. We loved it, and the pianist was great! He called us Utah and remembered us every day.



The next video is a shaky recording of La Bufadora, the blow hole in Ensenada. I was trying to get one of the really high blows on camera, but I never succeeded so this is the best you're going to get!

Final Destination

Wow. It has been a really long time since I have even looked at a blog. I guess I just don't have a whole lot of exciting news to post! This summer has went by way too fast, but it has been fun. Once again, I almost died at Lake Powell. Have you seen Final Destination? Well, that's how my life is, but only at Lake Powell. Just Kidding. Seriously though, I have some sort of near death experience every year. This year, I was climbing up a cliff to go cliff jumping and a huge five-foot segment of the cliff broke off and fell on me! It was terrifying, but luckily I was low enough to jump backward in the water so the boulder didn't take me down. It was very intense. I took the Praxis test the weekend I got home from Lake Powell back in July. For those of you who don't know, the Praxis is a test you have to take to become a licensed teacher in Utah (and other states as well). The test was definately hard and I was sure I bombed it, but I finally got my score on Saturday and...I PASSED! Woo-hoo! I am super excited to have that over with! Nothing else has really happened this summer. Right now I am trying to read as many of the required novels for my classes as possible before fall semester starts on thursday. I have finished four of the six I want to have done, which will hopefully relieve a lot of stress as far as homework goes this fall because I won't have to cram a ton of reading in since I don't believe in using sparknotes in place of reading a novel. Well, I guess I should get back to work!

What's up!

Well, I guess it's about time for an update! First--my car is all better, but here is the kicker..the problem the whole time (while we were changing all sorts of expensive parts) was that the first part that got changed (the cam shaft sensor) was faulty! What a waste of stress, time, and money! I have to register my car this month, and it darn well better pass inspection! Clogging season is over and we get to learn some fun solos for the summer. It's sad to be done with competition season but...we did awesome at nationals! We won another overall, which was way exciting for us! I literally jumped up and down and did a happy dance when I heard the news! ;) I will try to get some pictures up sometime. I have been pretty busy with work and school. The instructional technology class I'm taking is very fun and useful, and the teacher is great, but it is also very time consuming because every homework assignment is more like a big project! The class is nowhere near as bad as others in the program made it out to be. I was totally scared to take the class because everybody complains about it constantly and whines about how awful and torturous it is, but I am enjoying it! I had to miss the last class because I'm ridiculously sick and now I'm all sorts of confused. No bueno.

Today was our annual block party. It was pretty fun. I must admit that our ward puts together a pretty awesome party, even though I swear there were way too many kids for the amount of parents that were around haha.

Well, that's pretty much all that has been happening lately... TTYL!

PS....Totally loved Up. Go see it!

My Latest Frustration

So...a couple of weeks ago I paid about 200 bucks to get my car fixed...well it wasn't actually fixed. So, I took it back to the same guy and asked him to try again. Well, he was going to change the part that he thought was causing the problem, but my car doesn't have that particular part, so he told me he didn't know what to tell me and sent me on my way. I talked to another guy who was going to charge me $80 an hour just to figure out what was wrong, no including the price of fising the problem but he had no clue where to start and told me it would be a process of elimination changing each part one by one until the problem went away. Well, needless to say, I didn't go to him. I took my car to a Chrysler dealership. They changed three more parts, charged me another 400 bucks and then test drove the car before returning it to me. On that test drive, the check engine light turned on AGAIN! So, they took it back to the shop and apparently they now have to replace the ECM(I think that's what it's called), which is basically the computer system in my car and it is a whopping 900 dollars to fix! Yikes! Luckily, my warranty will cover the $900, but this whole situation is causing way too much stress. I cannot wait to have the problem resolved, if that ever happens! This computer thing better be the last thing that gets broken for a very long time.

WOW

So, I am taking a class called multicultural education. It is a required class in the education program at UVU. It is basically an awareness class. We read a lot of articles about different cultures, races, and other related issues. Most of them have been extremely eye-opening. Yesterday in class we watched a documentary on the civil rights movement. I was appalled. I have never really seen or heard such haunting detail about the movement. My high school textbooks mentioned some of the main events such as the bus boycott and the sit-ins, but they did not fully describe the violence that occurred. The documentary was full of footage of beatings, shootings, burnings, and bombs. It told stories of many innocent people who were killed simply because their skin was not white. One fourteen-year-old black boy from the North who was new to the South and was not familiar with their society, whistled at a white woman in a store. Later that night, a group of white men took the boy from his home, beat him to death, tied weights to his ankles, and sent him to the bottom of the river. The murderers were arrested, and witnesses(black) testified in court, but it only took the all-white jurry one hour to find the suspects not guilty. We watched footage of state troopers beating men, women, and children in the streets. We saw white people spraying the blacks with powerful fire hoses from extremely short distances, causing immense pain for those being hit by the forceful water. One black man and two white men who supported the movement were told by the sheriff to leave town (somewhere in Mississippi). As they left, police followed them until they were outside of town and then shot them. The federal government charged the police with breaking civil rights laws, but the state of Mississippi refused to press charges for murder. In Birmingham, Alabama, four young girls were changing into their choir clothes at Sunday school when they were killed by a bomb planted by the KKK. Nine high school students were the first black students in an integrated school and they faced persecution as they attempted to go to school. State soldiers guarded the school and refused to let the black children enter while civilians were threatening the students and begging the guards to lynch them. It wasn't until the federal government sent soldiers, including personal body guards for each students, that they were finally able to attend school. I cannot believe how brave those young kids were. Their parent must have been brave as well. It would take an immense amount of courage to send your children into danger for a higher cause.
The entire time I was watching the film and witnessing footage of barbaric beatings and nauseating maltreatment of innocent people, I could not help relating it to the Holocaust. There are too many similarities. We did not send blacks to camps, but we did beat them and shoot them for no reason. We planted bombs in their churches and killed their children. We refused to allow them equal rights and treated them like animals. It's disgusting. The whole time we were hating Hitler and the Nazis and wondering how anybody could be so cruel as to treat other human beings the way they treated the Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and other groups, we were treating the blacks like garbage. The documentary we watched started in 1938. That is one year before the official start of WWII. The civil rights movement went on much longer than the war. I love this country very much, but parts of our history are painfully difficult to study.

Why

Why is it that when everything seems to be going right, everything suddenly goes wrong? That is exactly what is happeneing to me right now. Lots of things have come up and I have no money, no time, and plenty of stress but it was all okay until this week. Everything is going wrong this week, and now that I have saved the money to pay for student teaching, licensing, and textbooks my care breaks down and there is a high chance that it is a problem with the clutch, which means it will be an expensive fix. I guess maybe everything going wrong is the best way to know for sure that you're doing something right. That is how I'm trying to look at ths situation. Of course, it could also be a sign that I'm doing everything wrong. Who knows. Anyways...that's my rant for the day. Sorry.