Back to the Rat Race. Don't Forget Your Briefcase.

Today was the first day of school. Things went pretty well. Today is the day I don't have a prep, though. At lunch, I finally had to excuse myself from a conversation with two other teachers because I really had to go to the bathroom. By the time I left the bathroom and grabbed my apple out of the fridge, I had 8 minutes to snarf the apple, a blueberry muffin, and put in my attendance for the first 2 classes. Phew! I even managed to catch up on a couple of e-mails before the rest of the day continued.

Tonight I also had my first day of online school. It's weird. There is a lot of reading. I'm not a good reader. It put me to sleep. I slept for about a half hour before I thought, "I should really try to finish this." One of my classes has the bulk of the week's assignments due on Wednesdays. Given my Tuesday and Wednesday lesson schedule, I guess I'll be doing the bulk of this class on Monday's. I got all but a couple of things finished tonight. Phew, again!

Here is my new blog for one of my courses. I'm sure you'll find it highly enlightening and become a frequent reader of it!

http://itlsbinggeli.blogspot.com/


Also, I learned two new vocabulary words tonight in my first day as a Master's Student:

subsume: –verb (used with object), -sumed, -sum⋅ing. 1. to consider or include (an idea, term, proposition, etc.) as part of a more comprehensive one. 2. to bring (a case, instance, etc.) under a rule. 3. to take up into a more inclusive classification.
effectiated: verb (used with object), -at⋅ed, -at⋅ing. to bring about; effect.

It happened at the dollar store.

I just got home from the Dollar Store. I needed a few supplies for my classroom, mainly various sizes of containers-with-lids (for things like dice, markers, and protractors). I selected my items and headed to the cash register. I stood in line for a minute and then noticed the happenings between the checker and the man in front of me.

The checker was a young girl. She was probably at most 16 and had 2 piercings in her lips, a hoop through her nose, and some piercings in her eyebrows. Aside from the painful looking piercings, she seemed like a nice, pleasant girl who was trying her best to help this man.

The man in front of me was probably in his late 50's, short in stature, a bit curt, of Asian descent, and when he finally left, drove a car with a handicap tag hanging from the rear view mirror. (All probably unimportant details, but I want to give you a visual to the story.)

When I began paying attention to the interaction, the man was asking the girl to find some type of text on a small bottle of pills. She was leaning on the counter with both elbows, the bottle of pills close to her face as she examined every inch of the label.

"What does it say?," he insisted.

"I don't see anything about that," she said as she kept looking.

"Hmmm," I thought to myself, "I didn't know they sold any medications at the dollar store. Maybe he has a headache and this was the closest stop. Does the dollar store have great deals on aspirin? What is she looking for on the label? Hmmmm. Oh look . . . Hannah Montana batteries and soccer stickers."

"I'm sorry, I just don't see it anywhere," the girls said.

"Fine, I will just get it anyway," replied the man.

The girl set the bottle down on the counter and rang up the purchase. "That'll be $1.14." The man fumbled through his wallet and threw down a $20.

"No change, just the bills," he said.

While we waited as the girl was pulling the bills out of the cash register, I glanced over and realized I could now see the front of the red label on the bottle as it sat on the counter. What was it? The label said "Male Enhancer."

True story. You can draw your own conclusions, whatever they may be. I just thought I'd share.

Jarrell left to the MTC

So Jarrell, my brother entered the MTC today. He will be serving in the Seattle, Washington Mission. It covers mostly the Metro area of Seattle. I am sure that he will really enjoy it. Hopefully, he gets to visit the Needle.

Good luck Jarrell!!!!

Jarrell's Farwell.

What's New?

This week has been very busy. I finally made it into work on Thursday and swore it was Monday. On Friday, I swore it was Saturday. I have been so confused.



Anyway, I survived my orientation at Utah State on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I have a few bruises from falling on a cinder block during a team building activity, but otherwise I survived. If I continue to survive, by May of 2011 I'll have an MEd in Instructional Technology with a technology teaching endorsement. The coursework covers everything from web design, html, multimedia, moodle, skype, blogs, video, etc. to grant writing and a course on how to convince people around you to use technology. Ultimately, the purpose of the program is to get teachers to use technology to teach kids. I am excited about the program, but still pretty nervous about being a student again.



The orientation was fun, though, and very informative. I think I have a good group of people in my Cohort for the next 5 semesters. It was a good opportunity to meet all of these people face-to-face.



In other news, we decided to bite the bullet and buy a new computer. Our main computer crashed about a month ago. James rebuilt the hard drive, but it's been sickly ever since and just hasn't been working well. What to do? Well, there's no way we can both be in school and doing homework (starting in the next few weeks) with just our little trooper of a slow laptop. We need 2 machines. So, we shopped around and decided on a super powered hp with a ginormous 23" monitor. It's pretty cool. You have to turn your head from side to side in order to see the whole screen. We even watched a Netflix movie on it last night. It's a lot nicer than our televisions!

My final thought for this week is that I am addicted to family history stuff lately. I'm pretty sure I am driving James crazy. My PAF is my best friend and I feel like I need to save the world by typing in people's names. Aaaaahhh!! Actually, what I would really like to do is find some names who haven't had any temple work done yet and learn the process of submitting them and doing the work myself, but I haven't found that yet. Oh well. I'll just keep typing names until I do.