Ch-ch-ch-changes…

Yeah, looks a little different here, eh?  New look, new title, all the Italian titles are gone.  No, this is not an April Fool’s Day prank.  I just wanted to change the name of the blog to better reflect all the babbling going on here.  That and I was getting tired of translating things from English to Italian.  And I figured that I had never made it on to the “Blogs of Note” because too many people figured that since it had a title in Italian, that the whole blog was in Italian, so they just skipped right over it.

Yeah, well, whatever the reason, here it is.   The name is sort of an extension of the comment “Yeah, better hurry up, you’re on vacation!”  that the proprietor of a little store right outside of Canyonlands Nat’l Park said to us one time.  The extension is that you see people always in a hurry to get somewhere.  Work, school, the store, a career, a family, retirement. Gotta get there.  In the last few years, thanks partially to this blog and my other blog, I realized that I’ve really loved (for the most part) the one that has brought me to where I am now and that I just want to enjoy what’s coming up.

So, here’s to the Journey.

Should I stay, or should I go now?

It’s been a hard year for me.   This is the first time in my career that I’ve been forced to change schools, rather than choosing to.  The culture at this school is very bizarre; fragmented,  isolated and conflicted.  And the transition from high school back to junior high has been, to say the least, bumpy.

The principal send out an email the other day asking the staff about who is planning to retire, transfer or  for any reason not coming back next year.  I’ve been thinking about a transfer for quite a while now, and this seemed like the time to let her know what was going on in my mind.  I had a very good working relationship with her for 5 years at my first  school, and felt like I owed it to her to let her know.  So I emailed her back and told her that I would like to discuss it with her before I made a definite decision.

It was a really good conversation.  She asked for specifics about what was bothering me about the school.  I told her about problems getting back into junior high mode, issues with the faculty, some of the staff, and also the isolation caused by the physical building itself.  She didn’t disagree with any of the points I made, she even told me about some of the difficulties  she’s had, and is still having, with some of the people there.  She talked about how at the other school she had seen me develop great relationships with the students, and despite the problems I’ve had this year, she knows that that is one of my strong points.  She asked me what she could do to make things better, I told her give me only 4 classes with no more than 28 kids in them.  We laughed.  In the end she told me she would help me any way she could, that she’d hate to see me go but she understood that I needed to do what would be good for me.

What the conversation did for me was to make me think about what it really was that is making me unhappy there.  I realized that if my classroom was running the way it should be, that if I was happy in my teaching (for the most part at least), that all the other stuff would be tolerable.  I’ve also known for a while that a lot of the problems I’m having in the classroom are my own fault.  In junior high the first couple months are crucial in setting up classroom procedures and climate.  Although I disagree with the old adage “don’t smile until Christmas”, there is some truth to not letting anything slide by, in discipline or routines, for the first few months.  Once you’ve set up the expectations, once they are set in the way the classroom runs, good or bad, it’s hard to change them, and way too easy for the students to fall back into the old habits.  That was my big problem, I started out the year like they were high school students, and something unique to the school I was at, like they were high school students that had chosen to be there.  It’s felt a lot like my very first year teaching, and the best advice I got that year was that no matter how bad it got, I had to try a second year.  To take everything I’ve learned (or everything I’ve remembered, this time around) and start out the year right.

So, I think I’m going to stay.  I need to show myself that I’m still able to make a junior high classroom run right.  I’ve never left a school because of the students, my first school was because of all the other crap going on outside the classroom.  The rest of the times I left I was going towards something new, not running away from something I was unhappy with.  If and when I leave this school, I don’t want it to be because of something I should be able to change, or because I didn’t even try.

Smog? Fog? Not on my blog.

Smoggy day in Salt Lake City today?  The tree branches all over my yard will testify that it’s too windy to be smog stuck in the valley.

Then maybe a fog has settled in?  Nope, no moisture on the car or ground.  The air feels dry, almost gritty. 

Yes folks, we do live in a desert.  The south-westerly winds not only foretell the incoming storm, but have also blown dust and minute sand across the valley.  Which not only gives the city an eerie feel about it, but means that as the winds shift to the north, we’re going to go from being blasted with tiny sand particles to getting hit by the smell of the Great Salt Lake.  Mmmmm Goood!

Hypocrisy, Utah State Government be thy name.

They hate Obama’s health care reform, because “Government is the problem, not the solution”, so they passed a law that presumably allows the State of Utah to opt out of this abomination.  They passed a law to circumvent Federal gun laws, to take back land in our borders that currently belongs to the Federal government and a bunch of other nose thumbing laws directed towards the Feds.  All because the less government, the better.  Power to the people!

Oh, but wait.  They’ve also passed laws to make it harder, almost impossible, for the citizens to get a referendum on the ballot.  Give the opposition an extra month to kill the initiative.  Give the Judicial system unlimited time to stall the initiative in the court system.  Don’t just let it get on the November ballot and see what the people are going to think, how they are going to decide.  That could be dangerous.

 

 

 

So, let me get this straight.  The Federal Government is too evil and corrupt, they shouldn’t be able to tell us what to do.  We, the citizens, are too stupid and too easily manipulated to govern ourselves.  The Utah State Legislators, on the other hand, are smart AND benign AND moral enough to be given complete control over governing the people of Utah.

But, weren’t they all elected by us easily misdirected morons?  Wouldn’t that alone disqualify them as “philanthropic overseers of the public good”?

Tell you what I think.  If we’re not smart enough to throw them out of office this November, then maybe they’re right.

Ditto.

Because this deserves as much exposure as possible:

WE HAD EIGHT YEARS OF BUSH AND CHENEY, NOW YOU GET MAD!?

Thank you, Naptime Nostalgia.  Very well put and I agree with you 100%.