Holy Frostbitten Toes, Batman!

BRRRRRR!!!! It's 28 degrees right now. In Texas! We are experiencing an "Artic Blast" and boy, is it chilly!

My students were disappointed that school was not cancelled. They kept waiting in anticipation for the announcement that school would be closed early. No such luck.

I'm not sure what will happen tomorrow. I want to have school because if we miss, we will have to make it up in the spring when we will desperately need a day off. But I do hope we go in late; that would be nice...

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I hope your day is filled with lots of yummy food, great memories, and tremendous amounts of love.

What am I thankful for this year?

*God, and His amazing grace! I can not express how much I love God and how thankful I am that He is always with me, allowing me to be called His child. I just hope that I glorify Him through my life.

*My beautiful friendships! I love all you wonderful ladies--Dawn, Kelli, Karen, Summer, Megan, Christy, Alice, Jaye, Lau, Angela, Amanda, Germana--you are all so beautiful and amazing:)

*My family, especially my adorable nephew! He is so dang cute!

*My job--I am so thankful to work in the school I do, with all the diversity and cultures represented. My students are awesome and I love working with them. I never thought I'd love high schoolers, but God has shown me that they are full of hopes and dreams and I want to see them reach their goals.

*My amazing church! I love IBC! God has blessed me with an amazing church family. I love the pastor and the Holy Spirit always touches my heart through his sermons. The singles' ministry I am involved in is fabulous and I am thankful for so many new friends who are on this same journey through life, seeking God's glory and desiring to live full out for Him.

*Hard lessons learned--I know, you are thinking, "what?!" but God has been faithful through some hard situations this year and I am thankful that if I had to go through them, God was with me, leading me, guiding me, and reassuring me of His presence. I have learned so much about God's character as well as what I am made of, and I feel stronger as a result.

*The upcoming roadtrip home! I am so excited to be able to drive 1100+ miles home for Christmas. It will be a good time of reflection, not thinking about work, and seeing the country.

I am thankful for so many things, but I will end my list here. God has been so faithful and good to me this year. I hope you are able to rejoice in all that He has provided for you. And even if you don't believe in God, I hope that you are able to reflect on life and be thankful for the many blessings that you have:)

What are you most thankful for?

oh, no, she didn't...

Ah, the joys of teaching. Last week, we reviewed the differences between the verbs ser and estar; they both mean "to be" in Spanish but are used at different times to express different ideas. For their warm-up at the beginning of class I had simple questions on the board for my students to answer in complete sentences. One of them was "Como eres?" which means "What are you like?" I was looking for answers like "I am tall" or "I am funny", simple things like that. One overly confident kid answered with "Soy caliente." The Spanish speakers around him started to chuckle and I kind of hid my face. I told him, "You never want to say that in Spanish." He asked why and I decided to humor the class. "Because it means you are horny." The class burst out into laughter. He was embarrassed, but I knew he could take it because he is one of the class clowns.

This would have been a good story, but wait, it gets better! In the midst of all the laughter, a girl says to me, "Miss, that's not what it means." She's Hispanic, kind of a rough girl, in a gang, etc. I looked at her and asked, "Excuse me?" She said, "That's not what it means. It just means he's hot, like good looking." I replied, "In Spain and Venezuela both it means the other." I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and added, "It could be different where you learned Spanish." She said, "How do you even know? You're not from those places." I told her that I lived in Venezuela for 2 years and studied in Spain. She gave some sort of sarcastic reply and I told her to go outside. She said, "Why? Because you are wrong?" and I said, "No, because you are being argumentative and I will not have it in my class." As she got up to walk outside, she said, "Stupid b****!" I looked at her and asked, "Would you mind repeating that so I can make sure to get it right on your office referral?" So she repeated it in a much higher volume. I asked, "Anything else you'd like me to add?" to which she responded, "I don't give a f*** what you write." Nice to know.

I wrote up the referral half expecting her to not be there when I opened the door. She was waiting. I handed the referral to her and said, "I'm not even going to discuss this with you; you know what you did was wrong." Later on, I confirmed that she actually went to the office. Her punishment? 1 day out of school suspension, 1 day in school suspension.

As I was writing the referral, the other students said, "I can't believe she would say that to a teacher, especially you!" Everyone else in the class likes me, she's the only one I have trouble with. Hopefully one day she will turn her life around...

Texas State Fair (finally!)

At Jason's Deli, before the fair. Yummy!

Meg and I enjoying Fried Coke.

cutest nephew ever!

I know I'm biased, but just look at that face!!!

road trip!

I'm thinking about driving half way across the country to visit my family at Christmas. 1100 miles. That's a long way! Flights are ridiculously expensive and I thought it might be fun (or at least interesting) to drive the 17+ hours. Lots of time for books on cd and good car tunes. I'm kind of getting excited about it!

What do you think?

random post

For some reason I can't get my Texas State Fair pics to upload, sorry. I can email them to you if you'd like. Just let me know.

It's been such a crazy couple of weeks. I know I haven't blogged in a while and it's impossible to try to catch up. Homecoming was fun but stressful. Last week I was asked to step down from my student council co-sponsor position. I was actually ready to resign (I had letter in hand when asked to step down). There is a whole big long story involved with this, but since I don't know who reads my blog I'll skip the details. If you want to know, I can email you the gruesome story...And just to be clear, I am still teaching, just not doing student council. A guy at church thought I had been asked to resign my teaching position! Can you imagine!? I'd be a mess!!!

My phone finally bit the dust. And I ordered a new one just in time! The old one broke in half last night (went to reach for the alarm to make sure it was set and knocked the already broken phone on the floor; that was all it took). The new one arrived this afternoon, yay! Actually, I take the yay! back because I'm not super excited about it. It's bigger than my other phone (although it does have a camera so that's kind of spiffy) but it's not as cool as I hoped. But what do I need all those gadgets and bells and whistles for, anyways?! I think I've been hanging around high schoolers too long...

I desperately need to go grocery shopping. I have nothing to eat. I feel like such a college student! After work I am so tired that I don't want to go and then on the weekends it's such a madhouse that I make excuses not to go then.

So, that's life in a nutshell. I'm going to keep seeing about adding those pictures because they are super fun.