life as I know it

So, the fourth graders are taking a test and I probably should be
writing lesson plans or something during this time. But I'm not.
Because I can.

School is going really well, overall. That MU girl is back again,
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week. She'll be gone tomorrow,
thank goodness. But she'll be back MTW next week. She cuts into my
lesson time... that bugs me. But oh well. She'll learn.

The ADHD kid in my class is doing a lot better. Still a long, long
way from where we want him to be, but he is doing a lot better. I
don't think he's getting the attention at home that he needs to be
getting, which infuriates me, but there's not a thing I can do about
it. Sometimes I wonder if he even has ADHD, as much as he just
desperately wants to get attention. He's socially immature, which
puts him at a great disadvantage with his peers. But he's smart. He
is in our district's gifted program. I hope he realizes someday that,
because he's smart, he's got a much bigger advantage than a lot of
kids in his position. A lot of the "troublemakers" are not good
students, and with out some kind of great intervention, they never
become anything. This kid has the potential to be a doctor or a
lawyer or an astronaut, if that's what he sets his mind on.

Life is crazy but I am having a blast with it. It's gonna get a lot
better when I can get my portfolio done. I'm starting to make some
real progress on it, but it's still a long, tedious process.

Last night I went out with S again. We went to our usual
restaurant and just hung out - but it was so much fun. We made our
"list" - just before or at the beginning of the meal, we always make a
list of topics to discuss that evening. He wrote on it "Friends
Forever". And when we got to that topic, he said he really valued our
friendship. That meant a lot to me. He may never know just how much.
I've lived through an awful lot of "friendships", only to discover
that a good friend is difficult to find. S has been a good friend
to me. I told him as much. I hope and pray that I can count him as a
friend for many years to come.

I've been taking my digital camera with me more and more lately, so
hopefully soon you will start to see pictures up on my blog. Maybe
even pictures of me and/or my friends... we'll have to see what the
future holds!

By the way, thanks to the lovely filter at my school, I'm figuring out
that I can email my posts to myself during the day, but then I have to
go home and hit "publish" for it to actually be posted. Crazy. So
that's why some of these posts might appear hours after the fact.
Sorry about that... I'm working on figuring that out. I'm still
learning CSS and the other internet languages.