The Shower Plan

While in the shower, I came up with this plan for this blog. Every day, I will write at least one thing I learned, one thing that happened that day, and one story from the past (gotta catch up on the years of non-journaling somehow). As a way to hold myself accountable for cleaning, I will also once a week post a picture from my room. This only seems like a good idea right now because I actually cleaned this weekend.


Decorating tip: a cardboard box may serve as an end table or just something to be thrown out.
The distinction is in whether you pile things on top of it

So, following my plan, something I learned today, brought to you by Elder Randall L. Ridd, in his devotional "Living with Purpose: The Importance of Real Intent." As my mom warned me, he does talk very slowly, but this talk was something I really needed to hear right now. A lot of big important things have happened to me in the past year (student teaching, graduation, going through the temple, teaching job, new car, new house, new ward), but I have overall felt a bit adrift. One aspect of this I definitely think could be attributed to my casualness towards scripture study and prayer, but I think even that has been part of a bigger problem. Namely, I don't really know what I want and therefore haven't really approached anything with deep sincerity, or as Elder Ridd called it "real intent." So, here's to figuring out what I really want and until then, committing more to the Lord and seeking His guidance.
Something that happened today: My mom (we hang out a lot) brought me a pack of mozzarella sticks, which I was really excited about. My dinner consisted of five of them, which was DELICIOUS, but I promptly felt not so great. Current relationship status with mozzarella sticks: it's complicated.
A story from the past: I mainly needed to start this blog so that my great moments in teaching would be recorded somewhere. And mainly so that THIS great moment in teaching would be recorded somewhere. Here goes: For all of the hours I spent in college attending education classes, they really did not prepare me for the sheer mass of small things that go into running a classroom. One of these small things is preparing seating charts. I have a nice little carpet with rows of different colors that I thought would make seating a breeze, since the kids just have to walk down a row and sit in a square. Not so. With first grade, I had already spent too much time trying to get them to enter the room in an orderly fashion and they were finally all in their own squares, without any randoms by themselves in the purple row, and I was finally writing down names. Again, you would think that having a carpet that looks like a grid would make copying down names into a grid very simple. Again, not so. I teach classes that range in size from 23 to 35, and there are 30 squares on this carpet. This means, some classes use every square on the carpet, plus a few carpet squares off to the side, and the red row has to move to the back anytime we use the smartboard because they are too squished in the front. And some classes don't have to use the red row at all and fit very nicely between orange and purple with extra leg room. This first grade was one of those smaller classes, and while copying down names I messed up by writing a few first-row names into the first row on my chart, even though they were sitting in the second row on the carpet. This threw all the other names off and was basically a small annoyance, but because this was only my second day and there was an instructional assistant there to help with a kid watching me, I was flustered. Flustered enough that I said under my breath "darn it." Not "damn it," "darn it." Of course, this being lower elementary, though, "darn it" ranks up there with "stupid" and "dummy," so I should not have said it. A little boy in the front row heard me, and looks up with his big brown eyes. And then he goes "Can I say s**t? Is that a bad word?" I tried very hard to not burst out laughing and said "oh yes, that's a bad word, we don't want to say that," but the aide was having none of it. "(First-grader's name here), you know better than that! In the corner!" And off he went, to the corner, which he interpreted to be the area next to my desk, behind the trash can. Where he knelt on the floor, like a penitent monk or something. Now I really could barely hold in my laughter, but I had to, or maybe I would have been sent to the corner, too.
Epilogue: that aide and I shared a laugh over the incident many weeks later, and she shared her own incident from her first year teaching. She was teaching kindergarten and would do a "letter of the week" thing, where they learned all about a letter of the alphabet. One of the fun things they would do is say everyone's name but replace the first letter of their name with the letter of the week. This was all ruined when they got to the letter "F," and there was a kid in the class named "Tucker."