"special teacher"

yesterday a student brought me a gift. a pewter ornament with "special teacher" engraved on it. i'm pretty used to these little gifts. the kids like me and 7th graders love writing you notes and bringing presents.

but this one hurt. it hurt because i felt completely undeserving. this girl is great. she's a great student, does her work, isn't a problem. and because of that i barely talk to her. when i told my mentor teacher how shocked i was to get something from her... he said "you probably talk to her more than anyone else"

how much does that suck. no wonder kids slip through the cracks.






**** I'm working on my portfolio... beware of related posts.....

So much to do... so little time....

1. The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
2. All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
3. American Pastoral – Philip Roth
4. An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
5. Animal Farm – George Orwell
6. Appointment in Samarra – John O’Hara
7. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. – Blume
8. Beloved – Toni Morrison
9. The Big Sheep – Raymond Chandler
10. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
11. Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
12. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
13. The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder
14. Brave New World - Huxley
15. Call it Sleep – Henry Roth
16. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
17. The Catcher in the Rye – Salinger
18. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
19. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
20. A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
21. The Day of the Locust – Nathaniel West
22. Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
23. A Death in the Family – James Agee
24. Deliverance – James Dickey
25. Don Quixote - Cervantes
26. Falconer – John Cheever
27. The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
28. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
29. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
30. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
31. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
32. Go Tell it on the Mountain – James Baldwin
33. A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
34. The Hearth is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
35. The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
36. Herzog – Saul Bellow
37. A House for Mr. Biswas – V.S. Naipaul
38. I, Claudius – Robert Graves
39. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
40. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellision
41. Light in August – William Faulkner
42. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
43. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
44. Loving – Henry Green
45. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
46. Money – Martin Amis
47. The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
48. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
49. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
50. Native Son – Richard Wright
51. Neuromancer – William Gibson
52. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
53. 1984 – George Orwell
54. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
55. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
56. The Painted Bird – Jerzy Kosinski
57. Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
58. A Passage to India – E. M. Forster
59. Play it As it Lays – Joan Didon
60. Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
61. Possession – A.S. Byatt
62. The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
63. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
64. Rabbit, Run – John Updike
65. Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
66. The Recognitions – William Gaddis
67. Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
68. Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates
69. The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles
70. Slaughterhouse Five – Vonnegut
71. Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
72. The Sot Weed Factor – John Barth
73. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulker
74. The Sportswriter – Richard Ford
75. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold – le Carre
76. The Sun also Rises – Ernest Heminway
77. Things fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
78. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
79. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
80. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
81. Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
82. Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
83. War and Peace - Tolstoy
84. Watchmen – Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
85. White Noise – Don DeLillo
86. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
87. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
88. In Search of Lost Time – Proust
89. The Brothers Karamazov – Dostoevsky
90. Moby-Dick – Melville
91. Madame Bovary – Flaubert
92. Middle March – George Eliot
93. The Magic Mountain – Mann
94. Emma – Austen
95. Bleak House – Dickens
96. Anna Karenina – Tolstoy
97. Great Expectations – Dickens
98. Absalom, Absalom! – Faulkner
99. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Marquez
100.Crime and Punishment – Dostoevsky
101.Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
102.The Scarlett Letter – Hawthorne
103.Pride and Prejudice – Austen
104.Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
105.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – Joyce
106.Tess of the D’Urbervilles
107.Finnegan’s Wake – Joyce
108.The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
109.The Trial – Kafka
110.The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
111.My Antonia – Willa Cather
112.The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
113.The Awakening – Kate Chopin
114.A farewell to Arms – Hemingway
115.Robinson Crusoe – Defoe
116.Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Stowe
117.The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
118.The Hound of the Baskervilles - Doyle
119.Dracula – Stoker
120.Darkness at Noon – Koestler
121.Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
122.Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
123.Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
124.Howard’s End – E.M Forster
125.The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer
126.Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
127.The Magus – John Fowles
128.The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles

I wish I was sleeping

Things that are new:
- I sent my first student out of the classroom.
- I recieved my first "teacher" apple.
- My supervisor gave me an application for Michigan Student Teacher of the Year.
- There is a ridiculous amount of puking in my life, I blame it on the 7th grade germs.
- I witnessed a student who during a tantrum threw a textbook through my classroom window.
- I've never been so tired in my life.
- I don't own a single orange shirt to wear to the Homecoming game.
- I miss my girls.
- I miss spending all day with my husband.
- I subbed for my teacher on wednesday, all alone, all day, and it was awesome.
- I miss icecream.

This month...

I fell in love with teaching...
I finished a mediocre book and started a great one..
I made 135 new friends...
I started looking forward to the future, while enjoying today...
I got a pearl necklace as a gift...
I cheated on my diet...
I called in sick when I wasn't...
I took an obscene number of baths...
I snuggled with Linky... a lot...
I lay in bed listening to my husband breathing..
I drank a whiskey sour on a roof deck...
I didn't take a single picture...
I found a role model...
I felt guilty and stretched too thin...
I got phone calls from California...
I dreamed about buying a house...
I thought of more baby names...
I realized I can do this...

(stolen shamelessly from http://theshadowsprovethesunshine.blogspot.com/ - I love you.)

he's in california,

and i am left,

dreaming of his fingertips,

the sound of his voice echoing across a thousand miles,

the sun staining his face,

sand clinging to his toes,

and me, sleeping alone.

It's incredible the feeling that comes when you're finally where you're supposed to be.

I started my final placement last week. I'm in a 7th grade social studies class and I'm in love. I've wondered over the last year or so about whether I'd taken the right path. About whether teaching was really for me, since I was so tired of school myself. About whether I should have gone to law or med school instead. (I still think I'd make a kick ass pediatrician.) Yet, when I'm with those kids, all that doubt fades away. Yes there are behaviour issues, yes there are kids who challenge you and make you want to scream sometimes, but teaching a lesson on latitude and longitude and actually teaching them something. Having small minds leave my classroom with more knowledge and a desire to know more. Hearing the chorus of "Hi Mrs. L..." as I walk down the hall. It's amazing. I'm in love.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

-R. Frost