So...I'm thinking about renting out the spare bedroom in my house, if anyone is interested or knows someone who might be interested.


Things have been going well the past few months. I love teaching at my new school. The kids are great, and the teachers on my team are all young like me, and amazing. We go out on Fridays, and we even organized a Thanksgiving style Fall Feast Celebration for the kids last week. The administration was very impressed with our extra effort, there was was way more food than we anticipated, and the kids really appreciated it. It was a lot of fun.
I also finally got a dog! I have been wanting one for ages, but I didn't want to get one when we were still living in an apartment. My best friend's dog had to be put to sleep, and my friend called me up so I could say goodbye before they took him to the vet. I was there the day they adopted this dog, and he was amazingly loyal, and loving, and an overall outstanding dog. It made me quite sad to see him sick, and know that he was going to be put down soon, so when I got home I told my boyfriend I wanted to go to the pound to look at puppies and kittens to cheer me up. We went to the SPCA, and low and behold, there was a adorable, 6 year old, cream colored miniature poodle. My boyfriend and I have always said that we wanted a poodle. The timing was next to perfect, and three days later he was home with me. His name is Willy, and he is calm, loving, already trained, and sleeps in the bed quietly all night. He rarely barks, he doesn't beg, he is fabulous with kids and my cat, and his whole body is a poofy afro. He may just be the perfect dog.

The closing for my new house is on Monday. At noon my mother and I will be signing papers at the lawyer's office, and then the keys will be in my hand. We went to the final walk through with the previous owners a couple of days ago. The house was filled with their moving boxes and other moving day messes, but somehow the house was even better than I remembered. The previous owners put a lot of hard work into the house, and it is incredibly well kept up. They seemed sad to be leaving, but the husband is a doctor and they are having a new house built for them in Maine where he will be working now. The wife is from Poland, and all the wallpaper in the house was carried over from Poland in suitcases and put up by her father. I'm not the biggest wallpaper fan, I usually prefer plain white walls, but this wallpaper is quite unique and her father did an amazing job putting it up. Even the insides of the closets are wallpapered.

The husband taught Barnaby how to light the pilot light in the fireplace/stove, and let us know about all the things they will be leaving behind for us! They will be leaving the sofa and love seat in the front room, which are a little scratched up on their undersides from their cat, but in generally good condition. They will be leaving a weight bench in the basement, which Barnaby is very excited about, the high efficeny washer and dryer, a vaccumm cleaner, two air conditioners, and a lawn mover. The best, however, is that the wife is an artist who made her pottery and cermaics in the basement, and she might be leaving her kiln behind. This is not only exciting to me, but also to my father who has this crazy idea that I am an artist at heart, and offered to finanace art supplies for me if I give him my work once in a while.

I had not seen the house since the day we decided to buy it, and on that day there was snow on the ground. The final walk through was the first time I got to see how beautiful the back yard is. I remembered it as being small and fenced in with a pergola against the garage, but the snow was hiding a patio and an amazing flower garden. The pergola is covered with three different types of ivy vines, and I don't even know what half of the flowers are. The small front yard is also covered with bushes, a small tree, and flowers. I am going to have to somehow develop a green thumb in order to maintain it. I hope I don't kill it all by next spring.

It still has not quite sunk in that I am a home owner. I am so grateful to my parents for making this possible for me. I am a little overwhelmed by the thought of home taxes, home insurance, payments, etc., but I am going to make this work. I couldn't be more excited.

soon there will be time.

Shit...it's been a while since I updated. I have been really busy with school. The kids had their second quarter Interim Exams for the past two weeks and I had to grade and hand them in yesterday along with their second quarter grades. I was handed the third quarter curriculum yesterday, three days after the third quarter started, and now I am trying to read all the material and make preparations to start it next week. The teacher I replaced left some of his materials and plans in the classroom which is helping me a great deal. It also helps that the curriculum is similar to what I did with my eighth graders last year.

My apartment has been cold, and my heating bills have been outrageous. I live in a typical old east side house, and the windows are drafty. I put up plastic over some of them, but with this weather it doesn't really help that much. The new apartment is almost twice as expensive as my old place, and now I am paying it all on my own. I'm managing all right, and I love my new location and all the extra space, but I miss not paying utilities and cranking the heat all winter. My classroom is always warm and toasty, and on these cold mornings I actually look forward to getting to my room early and standing in front of the old school radiators for a while. I have to crack my windows open sometimes because the kids get hot after gym.

Barnaby and I have been seeing each other every few days. It's nice. We aren't back together, but we have been getting along well. He's almost finished applying to Ph.D. programs, and he'll be done with his masters in a few months. He's applying to a bunch of local schools, but he has also applied to places all over the country, so he might not even be in Rhode Island much longer. I'm crossing my fingers that he gets into Brown. He thinks it's a long shot, but I think he has a good chance. We are taking things slowly, and it's working for both of us.

Well, thats about it for me. I'm going to go huddle up underneath my electric blanket with my kitty, and watch some of the crap on my DVR that I have been too busy to watch.

Oh, and i recently discovered Regina Spektor.

soo...i broke up with the boy a few days ago.
one negative,
one positive.
i got a permanent teaching job. i'm the new seventh grade english teacher at the school i've been working at for the past month. i have college students coming to volunteer in my classroom soon, and i only finished college this time last year.

i have the day off and it's wonderful.
the new apartment is coming along well. we have almost everything moved in. we still have a lot of unpacking, and we need to hang up our art. our backyard is turning into the place to be for our friends. we have a little fire pit, and have so far hosted two campfires. most of my guy friends are woodsy types that love to build fires and drink beer. my sweaters and hoodies are permeated with the smell of sweet campfire smoke; nothing smells quite like it.
it is so nice to be in a nice neighborhood, and know most of my neighbors. the kitty is extremely fond of all the space she has to run around in now. she slips and slides all over the pine floors. she is used to carpet.

my new placement at school has been a little rough. the kids are pretty out of control because their last teacher lost it and walked out in the middle of the day. i'm being really tough on them in and attempt to rope them back into any sort of normal and acceptable classroom behavior, and they hate me for it. the kids who want to learn are thankful for it, but that it only about 10 out of 130. it's still sinking in with me that i have five classes of read180 and literacy eighth graders. the low level learners, unfortunately, are usually the worst behaved students in the school, and i have 130 of them.
i have also been told that they may want to hire me for the rest of the year. i have not yet decided if this is good news or bad news.

changes, changes, changes.

i might be moving to a bigger and better apartment.

I've been working all over the place for the past few weeks. I been to middle schools and high schools, and I even subbed for a teacher that I had at Classical. Last week I got a long term job at a middle school. I have a good friend who's a TA there, and works on the same floor as me which is nice. I am only supposed to be there until the 28th, but the head of the English department has told me that she does not think the teacher I am replacing is coming back. She is apparently having some sort of nervous breakdown, which is quite discouraging considering we are only three weeks into school. This may mean that I could be there for a while.
The kids are similar to the kids I was with all last year; jaded Read 180 eighth graders who do their best to resist reading anything. They are incredibly challenging to teach, and often have severe behavioral issues. I understand their frustration with school; it can't be easy to sit in a classroom for two hours when you're a fourteen year old reading at a third grade reading level.
The teacher left me with no work, no unit plan or scope and sequence, and very few materials. I've been winging it while I try to get some of the curriculum together. The literacy coach has given me a bunch of materials, and basically wants me to teach to the NECAP (the quarterly RI standardized test) until the students take it in the first week of October. I've been doing "Two Minute Mysteries" to lighten up part of the two hours I'm with the Read 180 kids. Most of the kids seem to enjoy them, and I've been giving out mini Airheads if they can solve thy mystery. The mysteries are actually a useful tool in helping them with their reading comprehension. Even though they aren't reading, they have to listen to me read and decode and make sense of what they are hearing in order to put together the clues and figure out the mystery. It's actually quite challenging for them.
It's a hard job, and I come home mentally drained and with a strained voice from yelling, but somehow I want to stay. I could work in an easier district, go back to Coventry, but no. This is what is going to make me a good teacher.

Kahlua and soy milk is yummy.

summer is crawling by.

last week there was an intense thunderstorm here. providence is situated on a bay, and during the storm a huge oil tanker was transferring fuel to a fuel storage facility when it was struck by lighting. the whole thing went up in flames. i did not witness the fire, but my friends who did told me that the flames were hundreds of feet in the air. the newspaper described the scene as "fireballs, flames, and smoke". somehow no one was seriously hurt, and the fire was contained by firefighters in a matter of hours.
there was a liquid natural gas tanker nearby, although it was not considered to be in danger from the fire.
in the days since the fire, i have heard that if the LNG was to explode, it could cause an explosion with a half mile radius. that would mean all of downtown providence would be gone.
scary stuff.
i'm not the type of person to worry about such things, but the mental image of providence being gone makes me look around a little more than usual and appreciate what i have here.