Home Sweet Home

This is the first day I have been sitting in my house, not really doing anything since Tuesday. I went to that Learn and Serve Camp I mentioned, from Wednesday to Friday. It was pretty overwhelming, but actually a lot of fun. Going into it, I thought, "oh, it's just a camp to get you pumped up to serve in your community." Wrong. Apparently this is a statewide grant that had to be approved and put in to place by the hoitey toitey government officials. It's much more involved than I had ever thought. A Learn and Serve Grant is based on the learning aspect more than anything--learning how we can improve our community, learning what it takes to get a service project going, learning how to be a leader, learning the effects of the service project and learning how to improve it. There are actually STATE STANDARDS for this. The other teacher from my school and I had a lot of moments where we looked at each other, as if to say, "What have we gotten ourselves into?" But after many sessions of education and training on this grant, I feel much more equipped to tackle it. I'm just afraid of the responses of our fellow teachers when we conduct a staff meeting and they hear that the whole school must be involved. I hope to not be plummetted with blunt objects...Anyways, it was a whole lot of fun to hang out with a 5th and a 6th grader for 3 days. We spent a lot of the down time talking about stupid stuff and laughing about stupid stuff. (Somewhere in the midst of the insanity, our 6th grader Anthony became "Pantsony" and the 5th grader Bailey was "Hailey". Why is that freaking hilarious and had me laughing myself to tears? I told you I have the sense of humor of a 6th grader, plus you just had to be there...) That's always a good time. There were kids ranging from 4th grade all the way up to high school second year seniors at the camp, which made an interesting experience. I feared for our little kiddos when they had to participate in "team building " and "icebreaking" activities, with 18 year olds that were the size of Godzilla and their arms were blanketed with tattoos. But, it turned out okay. We brought Anthony and Bailey back to their parents unharmed and with lots of great memories, so that's what matters.

Yesterday I took my state certification tests about an hour and a half drive from here, where I attended college. I took two tests: one Professional Knowledge and one Subject Knowledge. The Professional one wasn't too bad. They were mainly situational questions pertaining to teaching approaches. It was made up of 100 mulitiple choice and 3 essays. I don't remember what the essay questions were, but I think I B.S.'d my way through them. As for the Subject Knowledge test, I just don't know. It covered Math, Science, History, Geography, Reading, Writing and even Music. I wasn't real confident on some of the answers, but I did my best. I am quite ashamed of the essay question for that test, that's for sure. I pride myself on my Language Arts expertise, so you think an English question would be a piece of cake for me. But, the question came at the end of 6 hours of testing and my brain was a deep fried Twinkie at that point. The question was: "List two irregular sight words. Explain how they are irregular. Describe an activity that a teacher could use to help 2nd graders remember how the sight words are spelled and explain how this activity would benefit them." AHHHH!!!! I couldn't for the life of me even remember a regular sight word, more less an irregular one. I took a shot in the dark and wrote the essay about words with silent letters, like could and would. I just pray that my B.S.ing skills came through for me. We'll see when I get the results...

Well, I have loads of crap to do, since it's Sunday and it's back to the grind tomorrow. It's good to be home.