Random

This is for update purposes only...mostly.   This is where someone tells me to write everything that comes to my mind for the next two minutes:
Watched "The Sing Off" last night - so sad to see Vocal Point go home and I promise I won't be watching again to see who won...none of the others are good enough to keep my/our interest.
Yesterday was a beautiful day in Provo, 55 degrees and sunny with a cool breeze AND there are still SO many leaves on the trees, I had a stressful day at school but nothing mattered thanks to that.
Still watching Planet Earth for my science class - breathtaking and makes me want to explore. However, I'm kind of scared of the ocean now.

Dreaded coming to school today. Substitute = I teach all day. Good news: It turned out great and I pretended to give my kids a tour of Alaska to show them how to add detail to their state reports. Thank goodness I had an awesome substitute who helped me a ton.  NO thanks to money for being so confusing to my students (or maybe it's me, or the substitute, or my teacher...no, I think it's the half-dollar. Who uses half-dollars?)
I'm getting observed tomorrow - what time? During math. awesome.

Went to opening game of BYU Basketball season tonight (which will be the only basketball we watch for a little while, no thanks to selfish NBA players) - Brandon Davies rocked the house. But we miss Jimmer.
I come home almost every day to Devin watching youtube videos of nutnfancy, a gun expert from Utah. He's so excited for Thanksgiving when he can go shooting whenever he wants with all his gun shooting uncles and brother and dad (oh and me, ha)

Thanksgiving. We leave in ONE WEEK.



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I know I said I would write about my school experiences every day but...I didn't realize how unrealistic that is now that I'm in the thick of things so it might be more of a once a week thing.
Besides, this week was H A R D. 

Earlier on Wednesday the other 2nd grade teacher came in and told me that one of her girls who comes to our class to math told her that I was a great math teacher.  You can imagine that warmed my heart, but I didn't get my hopes up too much.  I have to say, I dread teaching math almost every day because it takes a lot of creativity to turn these ideas from abstract to concrete for this low math group.

Just when I feel like I am getting the hang of things, something else comes to humble me: like "using data from a chart".  Having to teach it, anyway.  I had to teach about using clues to figure out a number such as "It is less than 40, it is greater than 36, it is an even number, which number is it?".  Easy right? Not so much.  The program wanted them to figure out which numbers to first ELIMINATE in order to find the right answer.  Well, this means that they had to read the clue, figure out what the opposite of the clue was, and cross those numbers out.  Low math group also tends to equal low reading group (not always, but a lot of them). So it was all just very abstract for them and to TOP IT ALL OFF, my teacher left for the last half of the day to take her son to the empty sea, I mean the MTC :)  (One of the kids wrote that their teacher went to "the empty sea" in their journals!)  So me and the substitute were both coming up with every way we could think of to teach these poor kids and the rest of the day was complete chaos.  Sub days = bad days.

 photo courtesy: amazon.com

But the kids are doing state reports and I can't believe how stinkin smart they are - researching in 2nd grade.  I don't remember doing that. I have two little girls that love telling me everything they find about Pennsylvania. My teacher also had me read them some awesome books about the country and states, like "Scrambled States" and "America the Beautiful" which has absolutely beautiful illustrations.

photo courtesy: Chris Gall

And on another note, our stake is putting on a Money Wise Workshop (a three-session workshop) with volunteers from the Marriott School of Management - Devin and I went to the first session tonight and although a lot of it was common sense stuff that we've already heard, it DID make us feel like we need to be more aware of how much money is coming in, and not just how much is going out, but what unnecessary things are we spending on?
    Namely, eating out and little things that seem really cheap when making one purchase but adds up when it becomes regular.  However, if you've seen where we live...we're doing pretty well at living below our means, haha. Pin It