This week has been one of the craziest weeks in a long time. I had parent teacher conferences, the new quarter started in school, our full language arts curriculum finally came in, Drew left for San Diego this morning, and today we had the real first snow.
Before I get into all of that, I had a very interesting experience while I was shopping. I was talking to a lady at a craft store. She told me that it was too bad I hadn't come in on Thursday because one of the things I was buying would have been on sale. I said that I wouldn't have made it because of parent teacher conferences. After talking for a little while she asked me how long the parent teacher conferences had taken. My answer? Three days, four to eight or nine. She then asked if I get paid more for the week of conferences. Nope. We spoke for a little bit longer and she finally asked what a starting teacher makes. I told her (if you are interested, it is public knowledge and you can look it up at my district's website). I felt so grateful for her answer. She said. "You make how much?! That is ridiculous. I can't believe you work so hard." Sometimes, especially after a long week, it is good to know that someone appreciates what you do.
As you read a little before, I had my first parent teacher conferences this week. After three, 12-14 hour days my throat is so raw I could barely hear my own voice on Friday. It was good to make contact with almost all my parents. The other fifth grade teacher and I co-teach. Which means we switch classes and only teach two or three subjects. We decided it would be good to do conferences together so the parents could ask any questions they wanted. It did turn out to be good, but it made it so that we had to do 50 conferences. Needless to say, I am exhausted!
The new quarter has started and it is going to be awesome! I have so many fun things planned for the next few weeks. We are going to start to learn about the explorers who came to the Americas. Then on to colonization. This is always a hard topic for kids because they often sense a kind of injustice in the colonization process. I never want to gloss over the details, but 5th graders are so young. It is hard to find a good balance, but there are so many resources online that help teach students about the past in a fairly balanced and age appropriate way.
The school I work at uses an alternate curriculum from the one the district uses. This is awesome because it means our curriculum is brand new and has some of the newest research behind it. The bad side is that the full curriculum didn't come in until this week. For our in-service day yesterday the other fifth grade teacher and I inventoried the books. Because the books were so late coming in, they actually sent us 3 sets to make up for it! I have 98 student textbooks. Good thing I don't have 98 students.
Today was the real first snow of the year. It has flurried and and snowed, but never stuck. Today it stuck! For Drew this is something he looks forward to all year. For me, well, I hate snow. Mostly it's not the snow, but the cold. Our thermostat has been broken for a while, but today was especially horrible because it was so cold. The problem is that our thermostat has somehow been reset to Celsius. That time in high school when my chemistry teacher said that I would never need to know Celsius, that I could always look it up, he was wrong. I wish that I had memorized the conversion!
If you have read this to the end, congratulations! It has been a long week and a long post. Hopefully all the interesting things that happen to me will space themselves out a little bit.
Well, as you can tell if you look back at the last time there was a post it has been a while since we posted anything. The last post was done by Drew, and although I am sad to report that we still shop at Walmart, he is still happy to talk to anyone who wants to hear about it.
Since our last post a few things have happened in our lives. Drew graduated from Boise State University.
We moved back to Idaho Falls. For a few months we lived in an apartment in Shelley. We learned we were not really country people, which I think we knew before but had to give it a try anyway. As soon as we could we bought a house near downtown Idaho Falls.
The house was built in 1927 and had a few major repairs. The first big project was the bathroom. Which looked like this:
Yep, this was it! There was a toilet and this tub handheld shower combination. We thought we could just take the tile off the wall, but they were kind enough to cement it to the lathe and plaster. This meant when Drew took the tile off, the whole wall came with it! For about 6 months our bathroom looked about like this:
But in the end, it has turned out awesome. We owe a lot to my father-in-law who has been an amazing help and we couldn't have done this adventure without him.
In May, I graduated from Idaho State University. No pictures here because that following Monday I had foot surgery. The recovery has been long and hard. You never really know how much you rely on your feet, until you can't use one of them.
Since his graduation, Drew has been working for the Idaho National Lab here in Idaho Falls. He is loving it there, and he gets to travel to cool places like San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
I am now working at an elementary school. I teach fifth grade and have loved it so far! I'm sure that there will be many exciting stories to tell soon.
Life has had its ups and downs, but overall it has been good. Hopefully we can be a lot more consistent about writing and let only a few days go by, not a few years!
Last weekend Britt and I checked out some documentaries from the library here in Boise and we check out one excellent documentary called: "Wal-mart- The high cost of low prices". I was kind of skeptical at first because I am usually disappointed with documentaries that are highly critical of an institution or a certain side of an issue (because there is obvious bias, but even more so because those documentaries often have major logical fallacies within the arguments they make), but I have to say that this documentary FAR exceeded my expectations. It was a great eye opener to what the consequences of Wal-mart are to the average citizen and for the business community as a whole. Most people are already aware of the monopolistic effect that Wal-mart has on the small communities it enters, so I won't delve into that area of the debate, but I would like to address some issues (in the documentary, and some of my own personal thoughts) about the major problem that Wal-mart poses to international well-being. I want to talk about 2 major problems that I see with Wal-mart's activities to simplify things: 1. The abusive (and intentional) use of national, state, and local government funding 2. Human rights, especially in regard to China. First, Wal-mart has lower prices than other retailers because they intentionally use taxpayers dollars to pay a large part of their expenses, including health care. According to New York Times article published last year, 10,000 children of Wal-mart employees were on Medicaid because Wal-mart does not give health care coverage to their employees (they have to buy into the plan, which most can't do because they make less than $10 an hour). It is estimated that Wal-mart is costing Georgia over 10 million taxpayer dollars. California is spending over $86 million is used for Wal-mart employees and their families in Medicaid costs and other public assistance. The list goes on. Wal-mart encourages employees to apply for public assisstance like Medicaid, foodstamps, and TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families aka. welfare). One of the ex-manager of Wal-mart, Jon Lehman, who is now fighting for unions for their workers, said, "that he actively encouraged and assisted his staff with applying for public assistance. "I thought I was doing a good thing at the time, he said. "Now, when I look back, I think, 'Wow, that's incredibly poor that the company doesn't care enough about its workers to pay them a living wage and to help them with their medical costs, to pay their medical expenses and things like that'." I think he put it well. A company that posted $100 billion in profit in the 4th quarter of 2008 (during an economic recession), has plenty of money to provide its employees with excellent health insurance. Yet, even when Wal-mart employees buy into the plan that Wal-mart supplies, they are still obligated to pay 1/3 of all medical costs in premiums! Considering the average Wal-mart employee makes $8.23 an hour (or $13,861 a year), how are they supposed to pay for medical care? or food for that matter? In 2008, Massachusetts is the first state to fight back by requiring companies like Wal-mart (who employ more than 2,500 workers) to pay state taxes on every employee that is not covered by health insurance to the Medicaid program. That came out to over $7.2 million in 2007. Think of how much Wal-mart has cost tax-payers throughout the United States. It is estimated that each Wal-mart store costs the national and state governments $420,000 in public assistance costs and with 3700 stores, the total is more than $1.5 billion dollars each year! Think about what our health care and education systems would look like if we had $1.5 billion extra every year! This abuse of state social services that are intended to be safety nets, not insurance programs for companies that cut costs, is unacceptable for any company, espeically one that employs so many people. As a side-note, each Wal-mart store contributes about $42,000 a year back to community organizations, which they disperse in small amounts to organizations and churches. This reduces the number of enemies that Wal-mart has in the community even though they destroy the local economy. Although $42,000 seems like a large number, it is less than 11% of what Wal-mart takes out of the system through abuse of the public assistance programs. Although all 5 Walton family members each worth around $18 billion, they give less than 1% of their wealth to charity, while Bill Gates has given 58% of his, yet they spent $3.2 million lobbying for conservative candidates in 2006. It gets worse. Wal-mart has a Critical Need Fund, which allows employees (that make 13,800 a year) to donate money to other employees that are in need of help with their expenses. In 2004, Wal-mart employees donated $5 million to the fund, while the Walton family (worth $90 billion collectively) donated $6,000!!!! After seeing these numbers it is even more clear to me why a progressive tax system of taxing the rich to help the poor is essential. The 2003 Bush Tax Cuts gave the Walton's millions more, while lowering the tax bracket even further. Second, Wal-mart runs factories in China and Central America that represent human rights abuses in the commerical sector. For those interested in the conditions that these people work in, here is a link to the part of the video that talks about Chinese labor, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Z9i8272jY&feature=related .
Wal-mart imported $18 billion this year from China, where the average hourly pay for a woker is 32 cents. On the YouTube video you can watch part #8 which talks about the problems in Central America. Although many companies use cheap foreign labor to make their products, I think it is important to realize that one of the reasons Wal-mart is cheaper is because they exploit people around the world. They have the same abusive practices in other countries, but there aren't public assistance programs to help those people out. I know this is already very long, so I will just say that I think that everyone should watch this documentary and to research the topic so that you can become educated about it. After seeing the movie I have vowed to stop shopping at Wal-mart, and I hope that you will too. There prices aren't that much lower, and the damage that they are doing to our nation, and the world, is massive. Wal-mart is a despicable excuse for a 'community-serving' company. It's practices are horendous and they remind me of why free-market capitalism was regulated in the first place. Hopefully our country can move in a better direction with new leadership to prevent abuses of the economic system that have hurt this country, and the world, so much.
This semester I am taking an education technology course. This is a required course for all teachers in education programs around the state. I have been amazed every class to find new and interesting ways to use technology. It has truly opened my eyes to the world that we live in. It is amazing the things that teachers around the nation, and world, are doing everyday with technology in their classrooms. I have become an adamant believer that technology has become a key to education. I especially love the fact that my teacher is open minded about many issues in technology.
This class not only helps educate future teachers about what technology they will need to know and use in the classroom, it also teaches us to incorporate these things for student activities. In this class I have learned how to:
Set up a blog (well, I already knew that one, but it taught me how I could use it in a classroom).
Create a site using Googlemail where I can store my documents and information for the end of the semester portfolio
Create links on this site
Create documents in real time with other people
Use technology in creative ways
It is so exciting to be able to learn things in a college class I know I will actually use in the classroom. One of the awesome tools we used in class was Google Documents. The cool thing about this technology is the fact that you can share a document with someone and then you can both edit the document, at the same time. This means that two people can be sharing a document, editing it and creating, and be hundreds or thousands of miles away.
I truly believe that technology has been a huge tool for us. And though this tool is amazing, we must be intelligent about our technology choices. This is why I believe that it will become increasingly important to teach our children about different kinds of technology.
Well, we're home again (I mean Boise home). Today was our first day of classes for our new semester. I only had two today, but Drew had four. It's been an interesting adventure trying to figure out how to get to campus with only one car. Almost none of our classes are at the same time, so we both will be spending a lot of time on campus. Although I didn't like this idea at first, I realized that it will allow me a lot of time to finish my homework, which means I will be able to just relax when we finally do get home.
Christmas break was wonderful. We got to see both our families, which was nice. We were very lucky, our break was a WHOLE month. Poor Hilary only got about two weeks, which is sad because we would have loved to see her more. We also missed Heather, Jon, and Asher, though we were lucky enough to see them for a couple of hours one night. It was weird not having them there, but I completely understand the splitting time between the families. It is a hard thing to juggle two families, but we love them both so much.
The start of this semester marks something else exciting. In February Drew and I will celebrate our six month anniversary. It's amazing how fast time has flown by, but I've loved every minute of it. Also new this semester is the fact that I will finally be starting my education classes. I'm so excited because it means that I am starting to get closer to the goal. It also means that I will be taking classes in the subject I am completely interested in. Drew has also started a lot of his upper level classes. If everything works out according to plan he will have his degree by the end of the next school year! We are both so excited and can't wait for what's ahead this semester.
Hello everybody. I know it's been a long time since I've posted anything. Sorry, it's been a little crazy around the house, finishing up classes and getting ready to leave. We only have one more week of school and then we head home, to Idaho Falls, for a whole month! We both are excited to get to spend time with our families. Normally we save all our laundry up and then take it home (it's much cheaper this way). But we've been gone long enough that we had to do one load of whites for next week. I guess everyone else decided to do their laundry also, and needless to say it was a little crowded. The laundry is on-site and only a little way from our apartment. Drew ran to put our laundry in, but when it was time to change it to the dryers he came back with our entire load, still wet, in the laundry basket. I guess two ladies decided to take up all 10 dryers! So this is what our apartment looked like, and will look like for probably another hour.
We had to line all of our socks up on our drawer sets, and even open the drawers so that we could drape them over the sides. Luckily my amazing mother gave me a folding drying rack, so that's where a lot of it ended up. But we had to put it on our bed (luckily my whites don't get soaking wet), on the door to our bedroom, and on the backs of our kitchen chairs.
I can't wait until one day I can actually have a washer and dryer all to my self, and I won't have to hope that there's enough room in someone else's machines. (And we won't have to scrounge for quarters just to put in a few loads).
Yep, you heard me right. We are taking our first trip home (as in Idaho Falls) from our new home (as in Boise). I can't wait to see everyone. It has been forever since I've seen anyone from Idaho Falls.
The reason we are heading home is for the Hillcrest Joust. Hillcrest is the high school that both Drew and I went to. The Joust is the debate tournament hosted each year by the school. From what I've heard, this year it is going to be HUGE! They've had to invent new rooms to hold debates, and they have been begging for judges for the rounds. It will be interesting to go back to doing the high school debate thing. It feels like years since I've helped out at a tournament!
Even though seeing some of my old friends and family will be fun, the real reason this tournament holds such great memories for me is because it was the place that Drew and I were "formally" introduced and set up on a date. (Thanks Marcy and Mom). So this time last year was when Drew and I sorted debate ballots together (oh, so romantic, I know). It will be exciting to get to go back to this place as a married couple, instead having an awkward get to know you session (okay, it was never really awkward, but you have to exaggerate the story a little sometimes). Anyway, I am very excited to go home, and I'm sure Drew is too. Hopefully we see some of you there!
