Blogger Dodger

I don't know about you but...

I'm just trying to do what I said I would...

Which is to write 500 words a day before I'm 'allowed' on social media...

Birthdays Are for Losers (Just kidding.)

So it's almost my birthday. My fantastically generous Steve has already bought me my desired gifts of a GoPro camera to use while bicycling and a modestly priced beginner's ukulele. I have not opened the camera yet, but am really excited about it, and the ukulele is on its way via Amazon. I feel awkward about getting such nice presents because two years ago he bought me a recurve bow so I could do archery, and I think I've used it about ten times altogether, so I feel like I'm not exactly worthy of gifts I don't use a lot. On the other hand, I also asked if we could get an ice cream maker we saw in Costco a couple months ago, and upon agreement that I would get rid of some other appliances to make room for it (both the slow cookers), we now have three different homemade frozen desserts in the freezer. I have used it A LOT so far. It's fun and challenging (I've already fucked up a few batches by making small errors...), and I am planning to make an actual ice cream cake for my birthday.

I digress (again?? yes, again...so sorry) into life's minutiae. The original purpose, if I recall correctly, and I hope I should because I'm the one who wrote it, of this 'project' was threefold. One, to improve my typing skills. Two, to practice writing. And three, to record my job search efforts. I also had planned on delving into stories and anecdotes about the fifty jobs I've had in my life. I may be exaggerating, but not by much. I had my first part time job when I was fourteen, cleaning up in a local hair salon. I think it could be very interesting (mostly for me I guess) to go back through each job I have had and talk about why I loved or hated it and any successes or fuck ups.

I have the feeling that if I were to do that, in between writing about my current position, that it would probably be a sort of therapy and might help me with the rest of my life. Nothing wrong with that... It's always a good idea to look at your life and be introspective with a little personal analysis of the 'why'.

Back to the Point of the Story

The first day of Summer school was without students, and I expected to meet all the other staff and teachers and find out what my specific role would be and how the class would be run differently from regular school year classes. In most special ed the students stay with one class, rather like grade school, and do individual work based on their abilities, often with a one on one instructional assistant (that's my job title). They are assigned to their classroom based on intellectual ability and age, but mostly behavioral history, like how severe their meltdowns can be and the level of violence toward themselves or others is. I could be wrong about that, but it seems true from my observations. 

I also expected to not know any of the kids in the class, but it turned out that two of them had been in one of my classes from before. So the first day I thought we would get some ground rules for the daily operation (we did) and then meet our individual class staff and probably do some kum-bay-ah stuff, like the name game to get to know each other, and perhaps some trust falls or a team scavenger hunt to build rapport (we did not). The first day was hearing gossip, moving desks around and papering over all the shelves and anything off limits, as we were borrowing another teacher's regular classroom. I think I may share some specifics later, but next time I plan on continuing to go back in time and explain what I have been doing for work for the last year...Cheers! Take care of yourselves.