Work Environment

So I was looking back through my blog a bit...I don't really know why I do that, but I do, anyway, and I came across a couple pictures I posted of my classroom way back in my first year of teaching.  Keep in mind, those are pics of my classroom that "made my students feel unloved" according to Mrs. Evil, my former vice principal and arch nemesis (current).  Fortunately, she got fired.  What a horrible statement, but seriously, she made my life hell that year.  That's not really what I wanted to get into (especially now that things are much better with the new administration).  What I really wanted to share are some pictures of my classroom that actually makes my students feel loved....or something.  Some of them are actually from the end of last year, but it's basically the same this year.  Except they painted the walls white instead of sickly blue, and we got new desks and my chairs all match this year.  However, the chairs are all now sickly blue.  But at least students aren't dragging their favorite chair to their favorite desk at the beginning of class anymore!

The front door of my classroom.  Welcome!

The other corner of the front of my classroom, and no, my map does not roll up.  It is permanently stuck in that place unless I climb up on the radiator to switch it to the US map, which I very occasionally will do if I REALLY need it.

All my students keep their work in their folders which they keep in these bins under the chalkboard.

If you turn around from the front door, you will see the back of my classroom. There's my class bulletin boards, my Great Work board, a place for students to check their grades, my World History Word Wall, and the Mastery Wall.

Here's a closer look at the Mastery Wall.  (Yes, I very discreetly blanked out my students' names.  I'm not sure if you noticed)  On each assessment, I see what state learning goals students scored at least 80% on.  So let's say questions 5, 6, 13, 21, and 23 are about Westward Expansion, and you missed number 23, but got the other four.  You would have gotten 80% Mastery on 5.1.4.a or whatever the state number is.  Then you would get a sticker in the corresponding box!  Believe it or not, my high school students LIVE for those stickers.

This is the other corner of my classroom I haven't shown yet.  Tucked back there is another door that is missing a knob, so I made that my teacher's desk corner.  The red bulletin board is full of students' goals for my class.  Above that is my US History World Wall. There's also the Student of the Week Board, No Name paper board (since doing folders, that hadn't been too much of an issue), my cupboard of art supplies, and a bunch of binders I give away.  This shot is from last year (as you can tell by the mismatched chairs).  I have the same projector, but this year I have a cart with wheels and a laptop to go with it! How fancy, right?

Here's a closer shot of my US History Word Wall.  Awesome.  I think it's a little useless, but supposedly it makes my students feel loved.

And here's a close up of one of my student's goals.  Woohoo! 

The last thing I haven't shown yet is my Wall of Fame.  It's on the closet next to the door of my classroom (the one with a knob)  My students love it and drag their friends/babies/parents/parole officers/pets/perfect strangers into my classroom to point out their name on the Wall of Fame.  So far it's a bit empty this year because we haven't taken any tests yet.  You get your name on here if you score over 90% on a unit assessment. This pic is from right after the first test in the third trimester last year, so there are a few names on there (which I have blurred out) but it's because I only had about 13 students coming total.

I hope you enjoyed the tour of Mrs. A's classroom!  Come back anytime, but remember, you have to come IN the back door (the one behind the filing cabinet) because it's the only one that will unlock from the outside, and go OUT through the front door, because the doorknob is broken off on the inside on the back door, so you can't turn it.  Also, it might be a good idea to come in October-November-ish after the humidity goes away, but before it gets too cold in Baltimore, since one of my windows is still broken from hurricane Irene.

I Can't Believe I Had a Whole Summer Off and Never Posted a Single Thing on This Blog...

I feel like I start every blog post with an apology for taking so long between posts...that's kind of dumb because probably none of you except my mom even really notices or cares...so... sorry I took so long between posts, Mom.  I know I had all summer off, but it felt like my summer no-school laziness begat more laziness.  Oh blerg, I talk to you on the phone all the time, Mom!  What are you complaining about?  I retract any apology anyone may have gotten from the above statement.  It's my life blog and I post when I want!

Earlier today I posted my 9/11 thoughts, so if you're reading this one first, please don't think I'm heartless and unfeeling.  I had some time today to write on here, so I got on to post about my summer, but started with 9/11 thoughts...it just felt wrong to switch gears and add all this stuff on the end of that post.  So if you want to hear some September 11 heartfelt memories and those kinds of things, check out the post from earlier today.  I promise I left my usual snark out of it.

Moving on to the summer that just ended (*sob* (meaning sad crying, not an acronym for something more in the expletive category which may or may not be fitting if shouted here)), and a couple stories that happened right before it started:

I guess I'll start with the first thing I promised WAY back in June (still not apologizing for the three month delay):  The Shelf That Tried to Kill Me!!! Dun Dun DUUUUUN (if you didn't get that, it was musical...figure it out.  Also, I need to stop with the parentheses.  IT'S MY BLOG AND I'LL INSERT RANDOM COMMENTS LIKE THEY'RE SECRETS IN PARENTHESIS IF I WANT! And type-shout, too, apparently.)  Ok, the shelf-star of the story that took place last May, or June maybe, looks great now

Shelf...it has some different stuff on it now, like the Bluebird Cafe Syracuse teacup and saucer Kelly's mom gave us for our 2nd anniversary while we were home (our wedding luncheon took place at the Bluebird) and I moved one of those empty yellow flowerpots because it looks lame with them both stacked there...anyway this shelf wants me dead.

But it was evil to get up there.  You see, we were running out of shelf space on our massive wall of bookshelves...yeah, we need to get rid of some books (you'll notice I didn't put that in parentheses like I was tempted to..Aah!.I just can't stop!).  So being the awesome genius that I am, I thought, "Hey! Let's get a floating shelf for one of the vast empty walls in our dining room, and keep our cookbooks on it!"  So we went to Ikea and got one.  Also we got a box of screws with sturdy-looking anchors there.  Foreshadowing alert:  big mistake.  Do not, I repeat, DO NOT buy anchors at Ikea.  This sounds like common sense now, but I guess we were stupid back then...three months ago.  They were not sturdy.  More like, um....slippery?  That might be the word I want.  So the shelf instructions said "Just make sure one of the three screws is in a stud and I should hold up to 30 lbs!"

"Woohoo!" thought I, "I'll just put anchors in all of them and make sure two screws, if not all three, are in a stud just to be safe."

Irony, you b----...ad, mean, nasty thing.

So Kelly and I skipped happily to a hardware store and bought a stud finder and I think this may have been when we decided to purchase a level that would have been helpful when I hung up our headboard way back when.  (Parentheses sidenote: Every single time I use or even think about a level, I think of a sketch from MadTV that isn't even that funny, but the link is here because it wouldn't let me embed the video.  I think Kevin and/or Bryan were there when I saw this.  If you either of you remember it you're cool.)

So I used the stud finder to locate three studs and used 2-inch screws and anchors and got it all on and it felt sturdy.  So trusting Ikea I put a couple books on there, maybe like 15 lbs.  And it all came crashing down!  I jumped back, but if I hadn't I might not have feet anymore.  I ended up getting super-heavy-duty anchors from a real hardware store and put in not three, but seven screws, four of them in studs and the rest anchored.  Before I put anything on it I tried to wiggle it...I was much more observant this time and noticed that it still didn't feel as sturdy as it probably should.  So we went back to Ikea and got three L brackets, I don't really know the real name of them, to brace it from underneath (The Magic School Bus taught me that triangles are the strongest shape) and used 2-inch screws there, too, just to super-stabilize things.  Finally, it worked!  It now holds more than 30 pounds of books and Kel's Food Network magazines and some other stuff.  It even lived through the earthquake last month with no problems at all.  I got it to work with my extreme stubbornness, and it looks pretty good, I say!  The only problem is it took us awhile to get used to it, so we ran into it a couple times after it was first up on the wall.   But along with looking cute, it freed up a whole shelf on our wall o' books for my ever expanding misc/Dick Francis collection.  Also, keep in mind the adorable green teapot on the shelf in the picture up there.  It is important later. Kinda.  I guess.

Next story.  The Evil Nail That Really Did Take My Foot Off--(Or At Least Caused a Nasty "Contusion" as the Witch Doctor Put It.
We were having some people over on a Sunday evening and I was putting a few last things away before they got here.  As I walked from the linoleumed kitchen to the carpeted living room, I scuffed my heel on a cheapo thresholdy-thing.  It's basically just a little gold metal thingy nailed down to the floor to hide the edge of the carpet, but whoever put the nails in took hammer lessons at idiot school so they were all kind of crooked and therefore the heads were sticking up a bit.  One of these caught me square in the center of my heel and took a huge chunk of skin out.  So when our guests got here, I was sitting on edge of the tub crying while my blood ran down the drain and Kelly was trying to clean the massive gouge and patch it up.  (I put this in parenthesis and italics because it's kinda gross and if you're really squeamish don't read it.  I've given fair warning. Fortunately it left a flap of skin still hooked on one side, so we got it the right way around and we were able to stick it back over the wound after we cleaned it out with peroxide and Neosporin and band-aid it up.)  Gross part over!  It wasn't really too nasty, right?  So I was limping a bit, but a few days later it was feeling a lot better and I could walk normally.  Story over, right?  Wrong.  About four days later I was feeling pretty good and then Evil Kelly and Evil Parents ganged up on me and told me since I hadn't gotten a tetanus shot since kindergarten I had to go get one.  I dug my heels in (ha ha...punny) but Kelly brought up all sorts of nasty pictures and information about tetanus online (Wikipedia, you are my new enemy), and he saw my resolve slipping because I wasn't sure that was the death for me and he took the opportunity to literally heave me into the car and take me to the doctor.  Once we got there he had the nerve to ask if he could go to the comic book store next door while I was back in the office.  He took one look at my face and decided he would stay in the waiting room.  Well, one tetanus shot and three x-rays later, a crazy witch doctor from somewhere in Africa told me "I haf to cut tis open!  Tis will not heal!"  I said "Liar! It is almost healed already you crazy fake doctor!"  But I didn't really, because no matter what Kelly says, I actually am a pretty nice person.  She said there was something black in the cut on the x-ray and she had to get it out or my foot would shrivel up and fall off.  She numbed it up, which was painful.  Who sticks a huge needle into someone's foot and then wiggles it around just for spite!?  I think maybe she was a mind-reading witch doctor, so she knew what I was calling her in my head.  Then she cut the flap off and dug around for awhile and I was crying and she told me to buck up.  Then she said, "Oh! Nevermind, there was nothing in there.  That was remarkably clean!  It was just the scab I saw on the x-ray."  Then I strangled her.  In my mind.  In real life I limped out to the waiting room with my "Contusion on foot" paperwork and shot Kelly a look of death for taking me to the crap-doctor from The Simpsons...only African style  (Why oh why couldn't I have gone to Dr. Hibbert?).  He is so lucky he wasn't at the comic book store because he would have had to walk home after I roared off in the car without him, and he would have been locked out of the house for a few days.  He is also lucky he didn't spontaneously combust from that look I sent his way.  I had taken that day off work (a Friday) because we were supposed to go to Philadelphia that weekend, but I was in no shape for walking so we stayed home.  When the numbing wore off my foot hurt, but my arm hurt worse.  Tetanus shots are so freaking horrible!  My mom actually told me a story that illustrates in nicely if any of you have forgotten the pain (I certainly hadn't even though my last tetanus shot had been nearly 20 years previous when I was 5, which is why I was so reluctant to get another one in the first place.  On to my mom's story:):  when she was 10 she fell through a window and cut up her left arm really bad and had to get a whole bunch of stitches.  She also got a tetanus shot in her right arm.  She said that she was doing everything left-handed for the next couple days because the arm with 20 stitches hurt less than the one she got the tetanus jab in.  Yeah...it's that bad.  (Update:  she actually wrote about that experience on her own blog here.) So I was really whiney and made sure Kelly and my parents knew how extremely miserable I was and Kelly took me shopping.  He got me that green teapot I pointed out on the shelf-that-wants-me-dead, some blue nail polish while waiting for my horse pills at the pharmacy (yeah, those on top of everything else.  I hate you Dr. African Nick---and no, that is not her real name.  Dr. Nick is the aforementioned shady doctor from The Simpsons for those of you who don't watch enough TV) and at TJ Maxx he got me a cool beaded throw pillow for our bed.  I also neglected to mention the amazing bench he got me for our anniversary.  Thank you Kelly!  He also took very good care of me, and only rolled his eyes when he thought I wasn't looking in response to my constant complaints.

There's the pillow (the white one) and the bench I got for our 2nd anniversary and my artwork and headboard in all their crooked glory.  I think I need to "whole. 'nother. level" it out.  Well, the pictures used to be straight until the earthquake hit.  I still need to straighten everything hanging on our walls after that...except for the shelf that wants to kill me.  That thing is SOLID.

But really, I think my house is trying to kill me. 

Enough milking that story, I healed eventually.  And school ended for the year!  So this brings us to yet another story:  Kevin and Lindsey Get Hitched...and We Flew to Utah To Be There When It Happened:

Aw, I think they're in love!

Kel and I jumped on a plane and headed to Utah. My brother Kevin got married this summer, so we made it a good excuse to go home for two weeks.  It was so nice to be with our families, and to be out of Baltimore humidity and into the wonderful dry heat of Utah!  We had so much fun. Kevin and Lindsey got married in the Logan Temple and had their wedding luncheon one day.

Kelly and me at the Logan Temple waiting for pictures

Cami and Kelly, both looking cute.

The next day they had an open house in Pleasant View that my parents threw.  It was supposed to be in our backyard, but it was really windy and rainy, so it got moved to the church cultural hall.  I thought it turned out really nice.  Good thing, too, since we worked all day on it hanging lights and lanterns and everything.

Kelly was smart and actually took a few pictures of the open house we put on. However, he didn't check to see if they were blurry or not...but there was an ice cream bar!

It was so much fun to see everyone from the 2nd Ward and from Bountiful.  I got told that the movie Freedom Writers reminds them of me...that made me feel bad because teaching here is nothing like that.  At all.  But it was sweet of everyone to think of me.

Then we got a day off, and the day after that we went up to Declo, Idaho for the reception at Lindsey's grandparents' house.  It was nice not to have to do anything hahaha, but we didn't know anyone so Kelly, Cami, Bryan, and I chilled at a table and talked.  On the way home we missed the freeway entrance and didn't get home until 2AM or something, but it was a fun drive.


The rest of the trip we had a fun fourth of July at Kelly's parents' house and went canoeing on Pineview Reservoir and saw a great blue heron rookery, which was really cool.  And we just generally hung out with the people we love.

Crouch Family!

Ahern Family!

It was hard to come home.  Especially when we stepped out of the airport and felt the damp air.  Humidity, I want to kill you as much as my house wants to kill me.


Okay, last story:  When We Finally Took Our Trip to Philadelphia That Had Previously Been Held Up by a Witch Doctor and a Tetanus Shot

Yes, in August we finally rescheduled our previously-canceled-due-to-foot-and-arm-pain Philly trip that was supposed to happen in early June.  We were able to get a hotel right in the city-center for cheap on Priceline and we just parked our car and walked everywhere.  We went to the Franklin Fountain for old-timey ice cream and sodas.

Franklin Fountain Mint Something-or-Other that we fortunately decided to share since it was so huge.

Then we walked around Independence Park, and went to the Franklin Institute and saw the huge mummy exhibit (no pictures allowed there).  Then we checked into the Marriott.

I can't remember what this was, but it's in Independence Park...same with the next two pics

Independence Hall on the outside...yeah, it's under construction.

The next day we got up early and got breakfast in Reading Market, which is huge and full of cool stuff and good food.  Then we went to get tickets to Independence Hall, but they were all gone.  They said we could go after 5PM without one, so we went back to Independence Park to see the Liberty Bell, but the line was so long I said "absolutely not"  I mean, I like history, but apparently my impatience overrides it.  Instead we went to a really old movie theater and saw Midnight in Paris.  Then we went back and saw some other things at Independence Park.  The line at Independence Hall was outrageous and I put my foot down and said we could go in it next time when we were smart and got tickets early early early in the day.  However, the line at the Liberty Bell went way down so we went in there instead.

Liberty Bell with Kelly and Kelly's pudgy-lookin' wife

Then we got back to the hotel and rested up a bit and walked in the rain to a Barnes and Noble and browsed around and got some books to cuddle up with later that night.  As we meandered back to our hotel, we stopped at the famous LOVE sculpture

LOVE in Philly

and found this really weird place with a bunch of things like giant dominoes and chess pieces and monopoly things, so we snapped some pictures there and also got some of the local architecture.

City Hall

Masonic Temple

Marriott Hotel

Then we went back to our room and cleaned up and went to an AMAZING restaurant called Chifa.  Chef Jose Garces made a super interesting menu there, mixing South/Central American and Asian flavors to make delicious and original masterpieces.  It's kind of cool, because the entrees are quite small, so you get 3-4 and share them family style.  All of it was really good, but our favorite dish was duck tacos with kimchi on top.  It sounds weird, but I think it may be one of the best things I have ever tasted.


The next day was Sunday so we had bought some things for breakfast and the 1 1/2 hour drive home the day before at Reading Market.  We got up, ate that, watched some TV, checked out, and headed home.  It was such a fun trip!  It was really nice just to have a getaway with Kelly.  It was also nice to be close enough to walk everywhere and not have to drive.  I had always had a nasty opinion of Philly since I had Teach For America institute there, and lived there without Kelly for over a month, only two weeks after we had gotten married, but this trip was so fun Philly holds much better memories for me now.  I would love to go back and see some more things.

Did anyone really make it this far in this post?  I know it's super-long, but I had a lot to cover.  That's most of the big things.  Summer was mostly relaxing at home for me.  Kelly worked, so I had a lot of alone time to exercise (a tiny bit), read, sleep, clean, watch Nate Berkus, and make stuff, like repainting this recipe box I found at Goodwill for Kelly!

Before:  Fresh from the shelves of Goodwill

Before: The Inside Edition

After cleaning, sanding, and many many coats of paint and some hand-painted lettering by moi

After:  The Inside Edition--I seriously love the shiny red paint in there.

One more gratuitous picture of my work.

 I should have worked on my Hopkins portfolio and those stupid online classes I need to finish up my masters degree, but I didn't do a single thing on any of them this summer.  I went back to school on my birthday, although the first week is teachers only.  That night Kelly gave me some presents, like the new Jane Eyre movie and a basket for storage in our living room that I love, and took me to a Korean BBQ place for dinner.  My mom sent me a Lowe's giftcard so I got the cordless drill I've been wanting.

24-year-old me, my movie, and my basket

My new basket in use holding magazines and our fluffy nap blanket.  Oh, and Libby, whose first reaction to my new basket was to bite it.

My new cordless drill!  Thanks, Mom!!! I put up a new curtain rod with it yesterday.  Kelly was getting frustrated because he had to take this picture about 50 times because apparently the way I actually hold drills makes it look like I'm flipping off the camera...also my face looked weird in a bunch of them.  Kinda like how it looks weird in this one.

 I was at school in a teacher meeting when the earthquake hit.  It was actually a little hilarious to see all my Easterner colleagues freak out when they realized what was happening.  The first two days of school for students were cancelled because of power outages from Hurricane Irene, so that was kind of nice, although our house was without power for five days and a lot of stuff in our fridge went bad, despite my 4 hour quest for ice.  Cold showers were getting a little old, so we celebrated a lot when it came back on.  But school's going okay so far. I'm teaching U.S. History to one class, Advisory to one class, and World History to three classes, so it's a lot of work to prepare for three different subjects, and my classes are all really big this year.  I don't have enough desks for everyone who comes in a few of my classes, and there are still a ton of people absent.  My rosters are all around 50 students, which is kind of insanity.  But I'm loving my students so far this year.  I was dreading school starting, but I think it will be a good school year.  Okay, I really am done now.  I make no promises, but I am going to try to stay up to date better on here so posts are of a more reasonable length in the future.  Okay, Dani out (for real this time).

Ten Years Ago

I got on here today to update the world about my summer adventures and all those things I promised to write about in my last post way back in June, but it seemed fitting to start with a 9/11 tribute.  After I wrote it, I didn't think I could really switch gears and put my normal sarcasm and annoying "pretend-I'm-awesome,-okay?-snarkiness, and all the fun things I did this summer into the same post...it just didn't seem right, so I'll post that stuff later tonight, but for now I'll just leave you with my thoughts and memories from 10 years ago today

I noticed on Facebook earlier that a lot of people posted a little something, so I wanted to participate.  I remember I came home from marching band at the high school up the street so I could catch my carpool from my house to the jr. high, because I was in 9th grade, so not yet in the high school building.  I was upstairs talking to my brother Kevin who was about to head to school too, when we heard my dad downstairs shout "Good Heavens!!!"  but we immediately knew there was nothing good about it; it was more a super shocked and horrified exclamation.  Kevin and I ran downstairs and saw one of the World Trade Towers smoking on TV and the news person saying that a plane had crashed into it.  I remember we were all thinking it was a terrible mistake.  Did the pilot fall asleep?  Did he lose control of the plane?  How did this happen?  Then I saw a little silver glint flying the the air.  At the last second I realized it was another airplane; then it crashed into the other tower.  I will never forget that feeling sinking in deep that this was no accident.  It was an attack.  I remember watching and watching replays of that and listening to the newscasters talking.  It was probably only 15 minutes or so before my carpool picked me up to go to school.  I don't remember the ride, but I remember when I got to school listening to the students who knew about it tell the students who hadn't heard yet, and hearing about the other airplanes crashing into the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.  Our principal got on the intercom and told teachers to turn their TVs off and get back to teaching and this had nothing to do with us, but only one of my 7 classes didn't have the TV on that day.  I remember Mr. Toponce, my Geography teacher, telling us that our principal was an idiot and this has everything to do with us, that this was our country, our people, and our history in the making.  I watched the South tower collapse in Mr. Nelson's Science class.

That evening the youth at my church were putting on a dinner for the elderly people in our ward.  We had been planning it for awhile and most of the food was already made, so we couldn't really cancel it.  It was actually a wonderful (though sorrowful) experience for me, and I'm sure for many other teenagers there that day.  We were able to listen to people who lived through Pearl Harbor talk about that experience, and how the country and their lives were changed by that, and how it would probably be similar for my generation and 9/11.   Later in the evening some youth were starting to act dumb, thinking back on it, it was probably their way of coping with catastrophe, but Kevin and I couldn't take it anymore, so we went outside and just walked laps around the church quietly talking to each other about what had happened.  I remember my family was a little financially tight at the time, and as we were walking Kevin brought up that he was working as a janitor at the high school, and he knew I needed a graphing calculator for my math class and he wanted to buy it with his money instead of having my parents buy it.  We went out and got it that night.  It's weird how vividly you remember small details of days like that.  I don't know if I've ever written all of this down.  I used to be an avid journal writer, but I don't think I started until my sophomore year of high school.  I stopped when I started teaching because I was so busy with other things, which is sad, but honestly, my first year of teaching was so horrible I don't think I want to remember it.  Though it was also my first year of marriage, and I do want to remember that part.  Anyway, my writing has wandered all over today.  Sorry.  This turned out much much longer than I anticipated.  I guess the point of all this is I just want to say that my prayers are with the families of victims and rescuers lost that day, and also the soldiers subsequently lost because of the events of September 11, 2001.