Good grief, I suck at this whole blogging thing! lol I just went back and read the few posts that I did a couple of YEARS ago... I did really well for while, but then it just kind of died off.
I don't really want to take the time to detail the last two years of my life, so we'll just go with, "it's been interesting." lol I've been hit on, cussed at, and disrespected by teenagers many times, but I guess that goes along with teaching high school.
A big thing that's changed is that I have gotten more WAY more political than I ever dreamed that I would be. The senator for my district in West Tennessee is a piece of work, and that's putting it VERY nicely. She has sponsored, written, and/or supported bills in the Tennessee Legislature that she claims are educational reforms, but they have absolutely zero impact on the students, and an extremely negative impact on teachers. The county where I teach was having a town hall forum one day that we were having an in-service day, so our principal let us leave early for lunch so we could go talk to her and tell her what we thought of her bills. I had heard her called every negative name under the sun, but I went into the first meeting with her determined to be neutral and to decide for myself if she truly had two horns and a tail... Turns out that she has a pitchfork too, because she was even worse than I had heard.
When I met with her in Nashville a couple of months after that, I was amazed at her ability to dodge questions that we asked, and I was also amazed with my co-worker Ian's ability to rephrase the same question about 10 times until we'd get at least somewhat of an answer. lol But then again, he IS an English teacher, so he should be good at using the English language. Anyway, when we went back last year, we said forget going to see her, because it wouldn't do any good. She'd just dodge our questions, lie to us to our faces, and try to rush us out of her office. So we skipped out on her, and went to go see Johnny, who is one of the sweetest people and one of the biggest supporters of public school teachers that we have in Tennessee. :) It's so easy to spend 45+ minutes talking to that man.
So yeah... One of the big things in my life right now is politics, because I'm the president of our local education association and we're in the process of campaigning for the woman running against that piece of work that's currently in Nashville. Never dreamed that I'd be able to have real conversations with politicians or about politicians and their views or that I'd be campaigning for one of them and handing out literature with them at football games! lol
It's been an interesting couple of years... :)
