Life & teaching & stuff.

Photo from our two-year anniversary (!) which we celebrated this past August.

Just wanted to post a quick update on our lives over here. It's been pretty quiet on the blog lately, but our lives have been quite the opposite! Between teaching full time for me, and the work/school mix for Daniel, we don't have a lot of free time. However, can I just say how amazing it has been for me not to be a student for once? I can't say that I miss it.

When people ask me how teaching is going, the short answer is that it's going great, but it's a lot of work. The long answer is: I absolutely love my students, and I have a blast at work (almost) every single day! Being a teacher is the single most rewarding thing I've ever done. But grading papers, long days at the school, e-mails to parents, working with struggling students, and planning double the lessons for my split class has been absolutely exhausting. I constantly feel behind no matter what I do to try and catch up. There are even times I have a nagging feeling that I'm not doing this whole thing right and my students aren't going to learn anything. I've had to take a step back and remind myself that it's my first year, I have a split class, and I'm doing the very best I can.

I was talking to Daniel last night, and I realized that teaching is probably the most stressful job ever for my borderline control-freak/perfectionist personality. My goal is for all of my students to learn and be successful, but there is only so much I can do before it is up to them to listen, and put in the work themselves. Teaching has really forced me to take a "chill pill" when it comes to every little thing being perfect. I have learned that in some situations, that is just never going to happen. I am just grateful that I am not drowning this year. In fact, I'm far from it!

As far as our lives go, if you were to ask Instagram, this is what we have been up to lately:

 Cheering on our Utes!

 Getting our culture on and visiting the new Museum of Natural History. 

Which we highly recommend, by the way.

 Crazy hair day (that I wore out to dinner and a movie afterward), 

and the shirt that my students have named "The Owl Shirt."

Turning garden tomatoes into homemade salsa with my mom, as is our yearly tradition.

 My owl bulletin board, and the sentence that made us laugh out loud for hours.

(Those things make grading papers infinitely more entertaining.)

Our trip to the State Fair, and the creatures that are living in my classroom this Halloween.

(From left to right, a bat, a crawfish, and an octopus preserved in formaldehyde.)

Thanks for reading!