Welcome spring!...or maybe not

Well it was an exciting day yesterday. I along with some other friends, attended The Festival of Colors at the Krishna Temple (I believe it's a Hindu temple). They have this big celebration to welcome in spring. It's a tradition for their culture and a big event here in the Provo area. Thousands of people attend including many of the college students around here. People end up having to park miles away and walk. I have heard of it before, but have never attended. It was very exciting. When we first got there we had to wait in a huge long line to buy "color". They sell these colored powders almost like flower. It is part of the tradition that when they light the "demon" on fire you then throw these colored powders all over each other. So we finally got our color. They also have this dancer that comes and live music. It was then time to light the fire. As soon as it was lit the hundreds of people started throwing this powder everywhere. For a good few minutes it was VERY hard to breathe. I also had to keep spitting it out of my mouth. It was pretty crazy. After pretty much all of the powder has been throw people get a little wild. There is crowd surfing, pushing, dancing, singing, chanting and lots of chaos. I almost got killed by two guys crowd surfing above me. I did survive the night and it was a lot of fun. We ended by going out to eat and getting some weird looks for people. However, we were not the only group of people there covered in colorful powder. It felt really nice to shower afterwards. So we welcomed in spring that night and then we woke up to a good few inches of snow the next morning. Apparently spring didn't want to be welcomed in. I was not very happy to see the snow as I am very ready for some warm weather. Oh well...it won't last too much longer. Enjoy the pictures of the madness!

Here is the huge long line. This was probably only about a third of the line.
Here is the Krishna Temple. It reminds me of Aladdin.Addie, me and Samantha in our "before" picture. We look all clean!
And this is right after all the color throwing madness. Not so clean anymore.
Here you can get an idea of how many people there were, how colorful it was, and a little bit of how crazy it was.
This was right before we left. I love the bright orange hand print on my face.
And this is the snow we woke up to this morning. Yay for spring!

My Life Update

My sister brought it to my attention that I need to update my blog with a new post. I guess I just have nothing that exciting going on. Well, I'll do my best to put up something exciting. The most recent events in my life include: Field Trip, SEPs (parent teacher conferences), and Easter. Our whole school was able to take a trip to see an Amelia Badelia (sp?) Play. It was a good time. So here are just a few pictures of that.

It is always fun fitting 70 6th graders on one bus!

Some of my kids' faces crack me up!

Another recent event was Easter. A couple of room moms came in and had a game and a treat for the kids. We were able to go outside and enjoy the nice weather. The game they played was a tag game. Near the very end one of my boys was trying to tag one of my girls and he ended up smacking her really hard on the neck. She fell to the ground crying. It wasn't long until a bright red hand print showed up. Poor thing. She came later in the day for SEPs (around 7pm) and she still had a red mark. I had to make sure her parents knew it wasn't me abusing her. It was really fun for the kids and they had a good time. And of course they enjoyed the treats. Here are some picture from that.

The one on the left here is the girl that got smacked in the neck. It hadn't happened yet when this picture was taken. The girl on the right is my little dancer. She is actually wearing a shirt that she got when she danced at The Stadium of Fire show.

If you look a the far right of this picture, you can see one of my girls trying to tag one of my boys. It's great.

I enjoyed/suffered through another round of parent/teacher conferences. They call the SEPs here. It stands for Student (or maybe it's specialized) Education Plan. The students come along with their parents and we decide on goals for next term. We end school at 3:10 and begin conferencing at 3:30. We go all the way until 8:30 that night with just a half hour break in there for dinner. It is a pretty crazy night. And then the kids get the next day off and the teachers have to come to school and work. That really doesn't seem fair to me! I really don't mind SEPs because I have really good, supportive parents here. I love to brag about their kids. At least I can brag about most of them. But there are those few that there ends up being more negative than positive things said.

This past weekend I was able to head down to Bunkerville (Mesquite), Nevada. I went down with my roommate Addie to spend Easter with her family. She has a really great family and it is always a good time down there. This is my 3rd year spending Easter there in the 4 years that I have known her. We go there Friday evening and didn't return to Provo until late Sunday night. The weekend consisted of: Dying eggs, rolling eggs down a hill, having an egg toss, laying out in the sun, napping, playing basketball, eating really good food, watching enchanted, playing with LOTS of cousins and aunts and uncles, hunting for Easter baskets, going to church, eating more good food, getting fun things from her grandma, and enjoying lots and lots of sunshine! It was around 80 degrees there and I didn't want to come back to Provo where it was cooler. I also fell in love with her two-year-old cousin! He is one of the cutest kids! If only he was 20 years older. I'm kind of sad because it was most likely my last Easter I'll spend there. I guess life has to move on. I love how all of her family is so close, both in distance and in relationships. I never really had that with my aunts/uncles/cousin, so I love going down there and being part of their family. I would post pictures from that trip, but I didn't take any on my own camera so I'll have to hunt some down.

Well, there is what has been going on with me. I've been doing well and I am enjoying life!

One of those days

Today is "one of those days". It kind of all started last night. I was on this "high" from hearing about EFY. I had friends over for dinner and it was great. Then I decided to sit down to a movie and I invited a friend over. Long story short, he was kind of a jerk and never end up coming. I didn't get to bed on time and therefore slept in this morning. I came to school not wanting to teach really at all. The morning started off by one of my students telling me that another kid got his head slammed in the door. Wonderful. So I got talked to this kid to see what happened and found out that 3 of my boys were trying to close the door to not let him and ended up closing his head in it. They then just left the kid outside crying and came into class as if nothing happened. I pulled these 3 boys out in the hall and they seemed to have no remorse or even act like they did anything wrong. So we had a little chat and I told them that they needed to apologize to this other student. Who knows if it happened. Then...my kids are just being very chatty and off task today. Our counselor has been coming into my class once a week to do an activity and have a chat with them to prepare them for next year. The kids were just being disrespectful and it was bugging me. The counselor was talking about good study habits including: keeping and assignment book, being responsible, turning in work, etc. And I was realizing how many of those things my kids don't do. She also said that there has been a trend in the USA that kids coming out of high school and college don't know how to "work". They are lazy! It is so true! So many of my kids are so stinking lazy! They want me to spoon feed them and get out of doing any of the work themselves. They don't read directions but expect me to explain everything step by step. They are all almost 12!!! You would think by this age they would know how to be more responsible for themselves. The term ends in a few weeks and there are so many of my kids that are missing so many assignments! I don't give a lot of homework! Most of this stuff is work we do in class and either they are so off task that they don't do it, or they do part of it and then never finish it and turn it in, or they do it and don't turn it in and then lose it! A big contributer to this is my 4 ADHD kids. One is on meds that don't work and they don't know what to do with them, one was taken off meds last year, one they took him off meds part way through this year to try a more "natural" method of dealing with it, I guess I only have 3 diagnosed with it, but I have another one that he is a good kid but can't control his mouth! It is like anything that comes to his head he has to say. Then I have another kid that is in his own little world half the time. Every morning they come in and do a sentence correction that is on the board, and every morning I go over to this kid and he is usually reading and when I ask if he did his work he goes something like "oh..." and looks around like he didn't know what he was suppose to be doing! Has he not been in my class for 6 months!? As you can see it's "one of those days". Right now my kids are silently reading and it feels so nice. After this it's spelling test then PE and then they are off to Art and Music where I don't have to deal with them. I get to stay in class and get all the things done that I need to. Oh the joys of being a teacher.

Good News Minute

I found out some exciting news today! I am going to be an EFY (especially for youth) counselor! I was so excited! I had applied months and months ago and had an interview back in January and had to wait until now to find out. This was what I was planning on doing to fill my summer and couldn't plan the rest of my summer until I knew if and when I had gotten in. So now I don't have to worry and can plan ahead! I'll be dong six weeks of it. I am done with school at the end of May and I start EFY the next week and do two weeks, then two weeks off and then do the first two weeks of July and then two weeks off and then the first two weeks of August. After my last session the next week I get to start into school stuff again. It is going to be a crazy summer but I am way excited! From what I hear, EFY wears you out! I am use to getting up early every day and being with kids all day, but at EFY I miss out on the sleeping part. I was looking at the pamphlets and stuff I have to read, there are like 100 pages of stuff to read. It's going to be great! As for the weeks in between...I'm not sure what I'll be doing. Probably taking a trip home somewhere there and probably doing stuff to prepare for next school year. So there is my good news!

Who knows...

I've always said that I am a computer person, so we'll see where this goes. I was just reading on my sister's blog and found out that another sister of mine has one and my sister Kristin said that now I need to get one, so here I am. As my title says, I have a boring/exciting life as a teacher here in Utah. I don't know if I'll ever have anything to put on here that people will actually be interested in reading, but we'll see. I enjoy reading other people's blogs, so perhaps they will enjoy reading mine. To start off I'll just show you what my life revolves around, my 26 amazing children. They really are a joy in my life no matter how hard a day I have had and how much I just want to kick them sometimes. At this age they are changing so much and going from little kids to teenagers and I absolutely love seeing it. They love being part of my life and are always asking me to tell them stories of things that happen to me or things I do, and I love being part of their lives. So here are my awesome kids! However...a few of these kids I don't have anymore and I gained a few more, but you get the picture. And this was in September, so a lot of them look quite a bit different. This picture was taken on "international talk like a pirate day". I let them dress up and we focused everything we did that day on pirates. It was a lot of fun!