Archive for the 'Work Stories' Category

1. The new staff at my school. As my school is a new charter, we are adding a grade every year. Thus, we doubled the size of our staff in, this, our second year. Luckily, our new staff is as ridiculously amazing, funny, smart, and collaborative as our old staff, leading us to have ridiculously [...]

It is the first official full week of my summer vacation, and it has taken me this long to wrap my head around the fact that I’m not a first year teacher anymore. Everyone kept saying that this would be the hardest year of my life, and while my job was difficult and stressful and [...]

Ha..hahaha….HAHAHAHA. Ha. heh. Oh, sorry. That was obnoxious. That was just me laughing at the mild ridiculousness of this question, the latest prompt form Gwen Bell’s Best of ’09 Challenge. My biggest challenge? I’m living it this instant, surrouned by papers I should’ve graded weeks ago, a week from a huge school-wide exhibition my students [...]

Instead of being all negative and whiney, I’m going to try to follow some of the excellent advice you guys left me and be postive and happy about all the things that are going well, because, really? My life is going pretty well. Well, I will pause for a brief moment of bitchery….The DMV can [...]

I play this game with my adivisory girls that I learned from my elementary school cousins in Boston called High Low, where you say the good things that happened and then the bad. They aren’t great at it, as their answers are always mildly vauge and tend to the negative side (they’re 14. Life is [...]

My 22nd year was, in the truest sense, a life-changing year. My life right now looks almost nothing like my life did last year: Last year, I was in the midst of high school-like drama. This year, I’m teaching high schoolers. Last year, I was drowning in homework. This year, I’m the one giving it. [...]

First of all, thanks for the encouragement on my last (majorly downer) post. Last week was especially rough, and the weekend was not much better. It included breaking out in a stress rash, driving to the doctor to find it closed, driving to my school to find my key didn’t work, and driving home sobbing [...]

Things I was going to Twitter because I’ve been too busy to blog, but then didn’t even Twitter, because I’m apparently also too busy to Twitter: – Remember that time I thought I was going to be a normal person after Institute? Hah. Yeah, that was adorable. I’m lengthening that statement to “two years or [...]

I’m done with Institute. I can’t yet process that and should probably be sleeping right now, so until I can form coherent thoughts on the last five weeks, I’ll leave you with a (slightly edited for the internet) email I received from one of my favorite summer school students. It pretty much sums up how [...]

And so LA Induction is over. It’s hard to believe I’ve only been here a week. There are already so many little cliques in the LA corps, and I already have some awesome new friends. The rest of the week here in LA was solid – we had more info panels about TFA’s corps values [...]