Tuesday, March 29, 2011

I know, I'm bad at this.

Maybe blogging just isn't really my thing, but at least every once in a while everyone gets a chance to catch up on something in my life :)

Last weekend Hailey, Cassie, Natalie and I went down to St. George to visit grandma and grandpa Pilkington. It was a quick weekend trip, but we had a great time. It was fun talking with Cassie and Natalie on the way down. Natalie got to see what it's like to be in a car full of educators, so I'm not sure how much she enjoyed it ;) She just got back from her mission in Panama, so it was great to see her again and hear a little about her mission. Of course, I'm not sure we let her talk much as we went on and on about school...seriously, school just takes over our lives. Anyway, we had a great time. It was once we got to St. George that the fun really started though. It turns out that the RV park where grandma and grandpa live during the winter has a closing social every year with...wait for it...a parade! I generally only expect parades around the 4th of July and Thanksgiving, so it was pretty exciting. It really was fun to go and meet some of grandma and grandpa's friends. It's clear they have a lot of great friends down there.

After the parade, we decided to drive to Zion National Park. Did you know that every spring the little town just outside the park has a spring festival?! Neither did I! We just happened to have the luck of visiting this town on the very day of the festival. We could tell as we were driving into town that something was going on because there were lots of people parked on the streets and quite a few people walking up and down the main street dressed in green. We stopped at a little shop to check out some cool art and pottery, and we asked someone what was going on. You'll never guess what we found out--okay, maybe you will, but it's pretty exciting, so I don't know...they were getting ready for a parade!!! That's right, part of their big spring celebration includes a parade, and we were just in time to see it! Actually, we had no choice but to watch it as we tried to drive into the park and ended up having to pull over while the parade passed by. So, we were only in St. George for about two days, but we got to see two parades! How lucky is that?! It was pretty fun, and it turns out, there are some pretty interesting people in that little town outside the park, as we witnessed in the parade. I've included a few pics below, so you can see for yourself :)

Overall, the weekend was a great break from my daily life as a teacher, and I loved spending time with family. The weather was a little cool for St. George, but don't worry, I still wore flip-flops and pretended it was warmer than it was :)

At Zion National Park

The Jell-O Queens of parade #2--yep, Jell-O Queens.
I know, you're jealous you didn't get to see them in person ;)

A pic of all of us just after parade #1

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Halloween!!!

I have to admit, I actually really like Halloween. I think I forgot how much I liked it for a while because I was a boring college student who never dressed up or really did anything to celebrate the holiday, but now that I'm a teacher, I love it again! I would just say that I love seeing my students get all excited and show up to school in their crazy costumes, but the fact is, I secretly love dressing up. Okay, I actually just love doing fun things with my hair.

This Halloween I decided to dress up like a rock star (if you ask Hailey, she will say that this was her idea, and I stole it, but I don't really believe that was the case--it's not my fault that we both had the same idea; these things just seem to happen). Anyway, it all started because I absolutely love the idea of putting brightly colored streaks in my hair. In fact, I would secretly love to have brightly colored streaks in my hair all the time, but I'm not sure that would go over too well at school...it might be considered an "extreme" hairstyle. So, Halloween is basically the only time of year I get to live my dream (and possibly on crazy hair day). See why it's so great to be a teacher?! To complete my rocker look, I used a little extra eye liner and eyeshadow, painted my fingernails bright orange to match my hair and added some awesome glow-in-the-dark stickers--yes, I did turn out the lights and close the blinds to show my students just how cool they were--and strapped on a rockin' guitar hero guitar. As you can probably guess, I had way too much fun with this :)

My students also had some fairly creative costume ideas. The most creative award would have to go to two of my boys who dressed up as "dead chicks". Yep, that really is what they called themselves. They made it very clear that they were not dead girls, they were dead chicks. Somehow they decided it's okay to dress like a chick, but not a girl--there's some solid 3rd grader logic for you ;) In addition to the dead chicks, there were witches, werewolves, babies, pirates, and various others. Another of my favorites was a boy dressed as a bumblebee. I've posted a class pic below, but I have several parents who'd rather their children's pictures weren't published on the Internet, so I covered the faces of all students who weren't already wearing heavy makeup or masks. At least they all look happy :)

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Don't Worry, I'm Still Alive :)


It's crazy how busy life gets sometimes, but it turns out, my life actually hasn't been all that busy...so that doesn't actually make for a very good excuse for not blogging. I guess I just spend my time doing other things, but I know everyone out there in the Internet world is dying to know what's going on in my life, so I've decided it's time for an update.


I am currently living in Provo, and I teach 3rd grade at an elementary school in Sandy. I was hoping to move to Sandy this year, but it hasn't worked out yet. I have a contract for my apartment here in Provo, and it simply hasn't sold yet, but I'm hoping to move soon. In the meantime, I spend about an hour and a half in my car every day. It's not fun, but I'm used to it, and I listen to books on cd, so it's not too bad.


In other exciting news, I graduated from SUU this summer with a Master's of Education with an elementary math endorsement. I also completed an ESL endorsement by attending classes once a week all last school year. It's now a little ironic that I finished the ESL endorsement because I work at a school this year where I actually don't have a single ESL student. ESL stands for English as a Second Language, and at my last school, half of my class spoke Spanish, so it made sense at the time :)


Speaking of school, I have now taught 5th, 4th, and 3rd grade. I have also taught at 3 different schools in the last 3 years. To be perfectly honest, I never imagined that this was how my teaching career would go, but I guess it's been the right path for me. I've gotten a lot of great experience working working in various grades with a wide variety of students and other teachers. It's certainly not easy to basically start over every year, but I know that I've learned a lot from it. My current school is a lot like the first school that I worked at, so that's been kind of nice. People ask me which has been my favorite grade to teach, and I honestly don't even know. 5th grade was great, and I loved it, so I think it's still winning, but I've enjoyed 4th and 3rd too. I think my favorite will be whichever I get to teach for more than one year at a time, and I'm hoping that will happen soon.


All in all, life is good. I've had a chance to spend a lot of time with my family recently with Zach and Nikky moving to Bountiful, and that has been great! My family is amazing, and I love spending time with them! I have some of the best grandparents, parents, siblings, and siblings-in law around, and I absolutely love being an aunt to Declan and Paige :) I'm very grateful for all of the amazing people in my life.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

January, February, and March!

Oops...I think I might have made a new year's resolution to try to blog once a month. I guess that one didn't work out so well. So, I've decided this post will be for three months--January, February, and March.

January--You may remember January better than I do. I'm pretty sure it was cold, and it probably snowed some. I believe it was pretty uneventful for me, but I did attend a full day math class every Thursday in January, so that was exciting. I got to write sub plans for each of those Thursdays, which is always lots, but it meant that I pretty much taught 3 or 4 day weeks for the whole month, so that was a plus.

On to February--again, I'm pretty sure it was cold and probably snowed some. The biggest event of the month for me was that I finished my math endorsement!!!!!!!!!! I hope the number of !'s helps emphasize how very exciting this was for me :) I've basically been attending math classes at least once a week for the past 2 years, so it's a pretty big deal to finally be finished. Oh, and February is also the month of Valentine's Day, which was fairly uneventful for me. I did go home for the weekend though, so that was fun. My dad even gave me, Sara, and Hailey each of box of chocolates, which was very sweet of him. He also placed roses all over the house for my mom to gather and put together into one big vase, and each rose had a note on it with a word describing her--we were all pretty impressed :)

And now, the month of March--still a little cold, but hopefully the snow is done :) This month has been crazy busy, which means that it has flown by. I started the month with parent/teacher conferences, during which I found out that I most likely will not have a position at my school next year. I will most likely still have a position in the district, but my school's Title 1 budget is being cut, which is leading to teacher cuts, which basically means I'm out because I'm at the bottom of the list :( This isn't the best news because it means I will be starting all over again at a new school next year, but I will still be very grateful just to have a job :)

Other exciting events for the month so far include a trip to St. George and my class going on a field trip. Hailey and I went to St. George to visit Grandma and Grandpa Pilkington, and our cousins Erin and Cassie came along too. Hailey and I got to try out our new golf clubs playing golf with Grandpa and Erin, and it was a lot of fun. We also visited Zion's National Park, which was beautiful. It really was a great trip, and I really enjoyed spending time with family and just getting away from everything for the weekend :) Sorry, I don't have any pictures of the trip to share yet, but I hopefully will soon.
For our field trip, my class visited the capitol building in Salt Lake City. We walked to the trax station near our school and rode the train into the city where we caught a bus up to the capitol building. The whole 4th grade actually went, but we couldn't all ride the bus and train at once, so we basically all went on the same trip but at different times. As teachers, we did a practice run on the train and bus a couple of weeks before to make sure that we all knew what we were doing, which proved to be very helpful...for everyone but me :) Yep, even with the practice run, I still managed to mess up. My class took the wrong train into the city...oops. I didn't realize there was more than one train, but there is. The only difference is that one turns at a certain point just before the all important stop we were supposed to get off at. Luckily, the stops get fairly close together once you reach downtown, so we were only a few blocks away from where we needed to be, and I decided that we could walk. Little did I know that walking those few blocks would turn out to be the most eventful part of the day.
Anyway, we started walking. I was in the lead, and I had 4 parents spread out in a line behind me, each of them in charge of 5 students. As I was walking, I saw that we were approaching a rather scantily clad woman who was standing in front of a vacant building, holding a cell phone. Honestly, her appearance seemed to match my idea of what a prostitute would look like based on what I've seen on TV/movies, but I told myself that it was the middle of the day, and she couldn't possibly be a prostitute. So, I quickly walked by class right on past her. Well, it turns out that a couple of my most troublesome students were at the back of the line, and as I reached a street corner and turned to gather everyone together, they came running up to the front shouting--"Miss Oswald! Miss Oswald! Guess what that woman was doing back there?! She was trying to get a guy to have S-E-X with her!...She's a hooker!!!" Yep, they announced this to the whole class. I looked to the parent who'd been with them hoping she wouldn't confirm what they were saying, but she just kind of nodded, which leads me to believe that what they were saying is true. I didn't get a chance to really talk with her, so I'm still not sure if they overheard the woman on the phone, or if they actually talked to her, or if some random guy had pulled up in his car. I was slightly mortified and a bit at a loss for words, so I believe I basically told my class something about it being unfortunate that they had that experience, and that they needed to try to push it out of their minds, forget about it, and move on. I believe I also apologized to the parents some 2 dozen times, but they were very understanding and realized that there was nothing we really could have done to avoid the situation :) Needless to say, the next day when students were supposed to write about the field trip in their journals I'm pretty sure every single one of them wrote something about the hooker. I'm sure years and years from now that my students will remember riding the train to Salt Lake City for a field trip and rather than describing the Capitol building and getting to see the legislature in session, they will be telling their children and grandchildren about the time they saw a hooker...oh well :)