I’m into my third week of teaching 7th grade!

This week has been so interesting. Hurricane Ike has been a big deal here, as a lot of refugees had to come here from Houston/Galveston. Well, the schools here work with the Red Cross to offer a place for refugees to stay–and my school was almost one of those. Teachers here apparently also double as volunteers/helpers when refugees are staying at their schools, so there was a bit of drama and stress due to that, as the school kept on being alerted that we were on and then off again a few times. 🙂 Fortunately, while those areas by the coast (like Houston) look like they’ve been bombed or something, we didn’t even have a drop of rain. It was a nice breezy day, partially cloudy.

Teaching has been so wonderful. I absolutely love the people I work with. They are dedicated to the students and so nice and helpful towards newbies like me.

Some highlights of the week are:

1) This was a partial highlight… one of my sweetest students’ family had to move suddenly due to a rent problem. That part made me sad, but it was so amazing to see how the other students treated her that last day. They all made her this big card and had everyone (including teachers) sign it. She also made me a little card (out of two index cards) as a goodbye gift to me. I’m going to miss her, but I also was so happy that her last day went so well at school and that she made ME a card over it.

2) One of my students knew how much I wanted to read the 4th book of the Lightning Thief series, (Battle of the Labyrinth), so he came to me right before the last class (he’s in my first class) and said, “Mrs. Boothe! I know you want to read this book–I just finished this in math class, so you can read it now!”

Say it with me… “Awwwwww!”

3) One student found this hilarious list of the most commonly mispronounced words. He thought it was really funny, so he printed out the list for me and gave to to me in class!!! So neat!

I’m so lucky to be here. The only downsides are all the extra stuff that I have to do… like being lunch detention lady and trying to keep up with lesson planning and contacting parents… and trying to get enough rest and dealing with the headaches. I need to call the doctor really soon …maybe monday… and see if there’s anything we can do to make these headaches stop. They are getting worse and worse again…

Jared and I also went “window shopping” for houses last weekend and today. This means (for us, at least) driving around neighborhoods looking for house flyers to get an idea of what areas we could afford, and the houses in that neighborhood. We saw some really neat things, like 15 deer in the middle of a residential area of the city… so neat! We also have hope that we might actually be able to afford a home before next summer, which would be so amazing! We really need to save up… but we’ll keep our fingers crossed!