So I've been meaning to add a post for about a month now. I'm amazed at how quickly the time has flown. Here's a brief summary of life. I'm teaching middle school English at a small Christian school. It is alternatingly fulfilling and frustrating. I can empathize with Laura quite bit. I would say that some of my students think I'm the worst thing to happen all year, and actually some of them may think that. I don't know. But I do know that most of them seem to be doing pretty well and enjoying the classes. Its an interesting dynamic, especially when I get the input from the other two middle school teachers. The three of us have to stick pretty close and conference on a daily basis in order to keep up with all the drama. I was however able to successfully manage three different student conferences today, one whole family conference yesterday, a week of standardized tests, and two new students this week without popping a blood vessel, so I guess things aren't too bad. Actually, I'm really thankful for the other two teachers. I took over the English class halfway through the year, and only had about a week of working with the previous teacher, so there were lots of things I had to figure out by trial and error. The other two teachers can sorta acts as mentors, and we can share our frustrations, so I know that the students aren't so upset with me in particular so much as me as the embodiment of everything they don't like about school. That I can deal with. I don't know if I'm going to teach again next year or not. I certainly wouldn't mind it, but we're planning on leaving for the field in just over one year's time and we haven't even begun our partnership development. We really need to figure out how much time we need to put towards that and what we can commit to. The idea of purposefully not taking a job so that I can put more time towards partnership development is kinda scary, especially now that we have a house payment (which brings me to my next thought).

Stuff is going well at our house. We've been slowly moving stuff in and organizing it, painting, replacing air filters, etc. My goal for this weekend is to buy a lawn mower and use it. And I also need a washer, and a dryer, and some new air filters, and a water heater, and a bollard, and some weather stripping, and a door, and... Well we'll see what gets done. At least I paid all our bills today and set them on automatic debit, so I won't have to worry about them (I hope). I'll try to put up a picture soon. If any of you are anywhere near us, please come by and we'll put you up and feed you. We already had some of my cousins and aunt and uncle visit.

Ok, well I need to get to bed. I'm helping out with the school's chess tournament tomorrow morning and I said that I'd play all the middle schoolers at the same time and give 10 bucks to anyone who beat me. That sounds a lot more impressive than it is, since I'm pretty sure only two of them will show up.

In Other News...
Most of my kids think that my garden gnome is a little freaky. Maybe I can somehow use him to get them to stop talking. Maybe not.