A Birthday! A Birthday!

Today we celebrated Lauren's 23rd birthday! I am very grateful for my wonderful-wise-wife.

Just thought we would hop in the ol' time machine and watch her grow up.

I love my job

So you may have noticed that the busier I get in school, the less I blog. Hence a lot more posts during the summer. I'm also not sure how interested you'd be in the day-to-day workings of a schoolteacher. However, this is my record, and I'd like to record a few things that have happened at school lately. One of the most disturbing events of my teaching so far happened a few weeks ago. I assigned a pretty easy writing piece; pick three topics from our last unit and write a paragraph describing each, and then write a fake autobiography of someone who lived in the time period. Pretty easy, right? Only two pages, and half of that comes out of their own imagination. When the due date came around, I was shocked to discover that only about half my students even bothered to turn them in. This is after time in class and the writing lab to work on the project. Most disappointing to me was the fact that many of my students had plagiarized their papers. Some of the papers were word for word Wikipedia, while others just changed "he" to "I." I understand that some students don't care or feel incompetent, but some of these plagiarists are bright kids with every ability to succeed. And yet they chose the lazy way out. I don't think they expected to be caught. I've been told stories of teachers who don't even bother to read the assignments; instead they just look at the length and maybe skim a few and then write form comments on the top. However, it was obvious to me that this was not their work, especially when they are using sentence structure and words that they have never encountered in their lives. Some transitioned from shoddy grammar and spelling into perfectly written prose without a single error. I was so sick after discovering this that I could hardly like my students. I pulled one student aside and discussed his plagiarism with him, and he flat out admitted that he didn't think I'd catch him. It took me awhile, but I've gotten over it, and learned not to take their actions as a personal insult. I've learned that students want to be held accountable for their work and their learning, and they instantly lose respect for those teachers who let them get away with stuff like this. My students may grumble when I make them work, but they hate it worse when I don't have anything for them to learn that day. Don't worry, I have also had some good experiences lately to balance out the negative. I think my mom was afraid I'd quit after I vented to her about my little plagiarists. Over the last couple of weeks, my students have voluntarily been asking me more questions about what they're learning. They're not content just to absorb the information I dole out - they question and ask why or how. They're actually taking an interest in the class, instead of just taking notes and memorizing for tests. One kid in my most difficult class even asked me to come back at the end of the year to sign his yearbook. I love my students. While I'm glad to be graduating, I'm so sad to be leaving my students. I want to finish out with them, and continue teaching them so we can grow together. I think it must be so rewarding to be a teacher, to be able to touch so many lives and learn from so many students, but also heartbreaking to see them move on and know your period of time with them is over. I only have two more weeks with them, and it's not enough. Student teaching has really stretched and tried me, but I can't imagine a career I could love more.

Rivalry Week

This is just to help everybody get in the mood for this Saturday...

Halloween!

Lauren and I went with another couple from our ward to the Bountiful Temple to celebrate Halloween. I was getting ready for the session in the locker room when Elder Russell M. Nelson came walking by.

I stuck my hand out and got a hand shake. I am shameless. So he was in our temple session. It was really neat because nobody said anything about it, meaning there was no announcement that he was there and he and his wife were regular patrons. He was dressed just the same as we were and he worshipped the same way that everybody else did. Everybody there was an equal. The point that I am making is that no matter what callings or positions that we hold in the church we all have to abide by the same laws and ordinances to return to our Father in Heaven. God doesn't grade us by our status but rather by whether we "lift where we stand," like Elder Uchtdorf talked about this last General Conference. It was a really neat experience. I wish I could better share the feelings I had in words.