Student Teaching Application Essay

I had to answer this question: Describe factors that have influenced you to become a teacher, and/or personal attributes which you feel will make you a successful teacher (250-300 words).

Can you say HARD?

But here's what I came up with and sent in last week, and I'm proud of it because I was as honest and direct as I knew how to be:

As the oldest of nine children, teaching has always been a natural and foundational element of my life. Everyone in this profession has had inspirational examples and mentors that have shaped their desire to teach, and I am no exception. Memory alone, however, merely determines our present condition, and must be coupled with passion and purpose if we wish to accomplish anything for our students in the future. I feel that it is this passion, this clarity of thought and vision of where I want to end up, that drives me and qualifies me for this work.

I have a passion for learning and for creation. School is a transient thing, but education is a lifelong pursuit that is deeply, intrinsically pleasurable to me. Because of this thirst for understanding, sharing my enthusiasm with others and teaching them skills that will enable them to become self-sufficient learners is my ultimate goal. I do love children, and feel that they are innately good, yes; but I have been around students enough to know that not all kids are "cute" all the time. I can get frustrated some days and still want to be a teacher, because of the importance I see in the process of learning, problem-solving, and overcoming our weaknesses.

Schools, as a whole, are failing children. Federally-mandated testing and the mediocrity of many teacher education programs are preparing children and teachers alike to be test-takers, not learners. Test taking matters, academics matter, but only to a point. Learning to approach challenges with hope, solve problems, work hard, and become active, responsible citizens in a democracy is the real crux of an education, and it is that focus that I wish to restore to my students. I want to leave the world better than I found it.

Yay, me!

I have to celebrate the little things or I get anxious and depressed. So here is what I'm happy about today:

(1) I finished not one, not two, but THREE major projects for school today, and have uploaded everything I could possibly need onto Taskstream, the bane of every elementary education major's existence. With the exception of my social studies journals for the last 8 weeks and reading two short young adult novels and doing some minor math homework, the rest that's left of the semester is three finals!

(2) I am getting closer to mastering the right amount of rice to cook for dinner. Paul & I always seem to make too much, and rice just doesn't save right, so then the leftovers sit in my fridge, piling up...but whenever I try to skimp on the rice, we both end up wanting more. :) Tonight, I only had about 3/4 cup of rice left over, and if we hadn't been munching on crackers and chocolates all day we'd probably have finished it off!

(3) I didn't swell up in hives today. Whether this is because I'm no longer allergic to the frigid winter air or because I ingested some allergy meds yesterday afternoon that haven't worn off yet, I don't know, but any day you don't swell up in puffy, itchy hives is a good day, right?

That's the end. Now, since Paul's into his book and I don't feel like reading any more than I already have had to today, I'm going to go play mindless games for a few hours and enjoy being proud of myself.

One last post, I promise!

I just wanted to thank all of you readers for your support and encouragement at such a crazy time in my life. You are all so wonderful and loving and I consider you all dear friends. Thanks! The end.

YAY!!!

I figured it out. My internet was just being dumb. :) And now it's back to studying so I can have fun tonight. But first:

Yesterday was our anniversary. It was fun. Paul & I went to O'Charley's, which is a great restaurant not so much because of the food but because of the sentimentality attached to it. It was at O'Charley's that my flirting with a random waiter sparked Paul's will to act, and where he jokingly offered to be my "boyfriend for the day"...which, it just so happened, stuck. :) No flirting with any waiters was involved this time around. ;)

Then we came back to my apartment to watch Prince Caspian, but we were both a little tired and more in the mood to snuggle, anyway. So we just snuggled and talked for about 3 1/2 hours, 'til he had to leave. It was marvelous.

Happy one year to us!

Okay, back to studying, for real this time.

GRR!!!

:) I'm over my pity party now, but I have to admit, I'm having a hard time changing my blog background. Nothing works! So if you're reading this on a white background, check back in a few to see if I didn't figure it out. I might have to give up today...

Holiday Blues

Let me preface this post by saying that few people in this world understand better than I do the power of positive thinking. You HAVE to be a positive thinker to survive my wonderful but very broken family, my marvelous but exhausting friends, the amount of hypocrisy and red tape involved in my schooling, the precious but challenging students in my line of work, and really just my life in general. I've been told often (though not lately...) that I'm a positive and forward-looking person, and that's a quality that I'm trying to cultivate again in my life. A series of events has sort of taken it out of me, and I'm not proud about that.

However. There is nothing anywhere that says you have to be happy all the time. In fact, even scripture dictates otherwise. There are times and seasons that are wonderful and times and seasons that are gut-wrenchingly bad and, too often, times right in the middle that seem to come and go without any particular note at all. I'd hardly say that this season is a terrible time, or an in-betweenie. But it certainly isn't wonderful, either.

My dad is having surgery in about a week and a half to have his eye removed. His cancer isn't really getting better, and the medicine makes him SO sick and tired. I'm incredibly grateful that he's still alive and that he's a part of my life, but seeing him suffer is an awful way to spend the holiday season--although it's completely preferable to the alternative. I am SO TERRIFIED that he will die before seeing my wedding. It's selfish, I know, but I want him there. And I want him there for my first child. And my second. And so on.

Actually, it's not entirely selfish. My parents have both had close encounters with death, multiple times. They have also both known more than their fair share of misery and mediocrity in their lives. I want them both to experience something grand and glorious, something that this life alone can offer, before they pass on. I want them to have an experience that changes their entire lives, that makes every moment of sacrifice and pain worth it.

Paul isn't here. Our last holiday season as "singles," and it's frankly boring, dull, and lonely without him. He's my best friend in the whole world and it's strange to be celebrating anything without him by my side. He also FINALLY got the chance to tell his parents about our engagement, and they're...less than thrilled. More like apalled and angry and disappointed all rolled up into one. It's a big party for him...and I don't even get to hold his hand through it. :(

I have been having a few health problems of my own lately. I had a back/hip issue that resulted in my withdrawing from BYU a few years ago, going through physical therapy, that whole bit. Recently, the pains have been returning and I have no idea what to do. I've also had some internal issues that I'm sure you don't care to hear about and am STILL gaining weight, which may very well be my thyroid as my mom suggests but I can't really worry about that right now because I have no insurance and I have a wedding to pay for. And I woke up this morning bleeding out of both nostrils.

I'm terrified. I made the choice to do my student teaching in Chicago, and I'm not as excited about it yet as I'd like to be. But it's for the best, and I believe in my decision. I'm just scared to pieces about all the lives I'm going to screw up...hopefully not...but still...

My brother's...well, if you know anything about my brother, then I need no further explanation.

Every holiday season for years and years has been like this, only worse. I feel like I'm always just holding my breath come November because sometime in the next two months something big and awful is going to happen. And it always does. Then last year, with just starting to date Paul, I was pretty optimistic and didn't have the holiday blues nearly at all. And the bad news waited until after New Year's to creep up, which was a blessing. And now I'm engaged, for crying out loud!!! I should be over this by now.

I just don't understand how Christmas, and really every holiday, just never lives up to what it was in my childhood. I feel worse than blue. I feel numb. I'm afraid to feel anything right now, because I'll just cry like I seem to do at least once a day now. I'm happy, I cry. I'm sad, I cry. I'm angry, I cry. It's insane. Ah, my life...you're crazy, dear reader, for being my friend!

Writing Club: Women of the Moose

For our very first writing club ever, we decided to all write a short piece under the same title. Let me describe writing club to you who have never had the pleasure of being there: first, people come over and we all set up our laptops and/or paper/pens. Then we sit and talk/eat/whatever for several minutes/hours, until someone finally says, "Okay, so, what are we gonna do tonight?" And then we spend a few minutes picking out our prompt from a list we generated during our first meeting. Then, after we have the prompt, we have about 20-30 minutes on average to write to our hearts' content. Then, we share our stories aloud and laugh at each other a lot. It's SO much fun. I wish everyone could do it. I wish we had started it earlier. Since I LOVE to write but haven't had a lot of time since starting school again to really get into it, it's nice to keep in touch with my "muse" once a week or so and keep those creative juices flowing. It's also wonderful to share in the joy of creation with several close friends who enjoy it at least as much as I do.

SO. Here's my "Women of the Moose."

As nighttime’s fog slinks o’er your mind
And wildest dreams let loose,
That is the place each night I find
The women of the moose.

At first a thunderous voice proclaims
So bold it must be Zeus,
“Halt, maiden, and behold my treasured
Women of the Moose!”

I stammer out a spittle sound,
Myself to introduce,
But does he care? Oh, no! He has his
Women of the Moose.

First one of them, her eyes too old
And speech small from disuse,
Approaches me, eyelashes thick,
As all women of the moose

Look on with wary wonderment
At the impending truce.
“Come, follow,” she says simply, and
The women of the moose

Lead me along a river’s bend;
I hear the babbling juice
Of mother earth sing back to these
Fair women of the moose.

I’d run away, but where’d I go?
I find no good excuse,
So follow on in silence, trusting
Women of the moose.

A cave we enter, black as fear,
Designed for a recluse.
Then in the shadows fire lights
And women of the moose

Start dancing fiery ‘round the thing,
And sultry calls produce.
I wonder at their gall and grit,
These women of the moose.

Their shoulders boulders, legs trimmed thin,
Their eyes a watery noose,
I am entranced by their display
As women of the moose.

And all around the forest now
I feel the earth seduced
And sky bewitched in unnatural trance
Called Women of the Moose.

When in their midst I see him rise,
A glorious beast called Bruce,
And tentatively smile do I,
While women of the moose

Bow down devotion, purpose veiled,
But from what I can deduce
I think that Bruce’s harem is
The women of the moose.

And why it is I dream of them
Each night, my mind’s abuse,
Perhaps I’ll tell when I become
Head Woman of the Moose.

Writing Club: First Line

All of our stories had to begin with the phrase "It was the worst day of..."


It was the worst day of band camp in the history of all band camps that ever were. I don’t even have to do any research to know this, I am so certain that it is a fact that I don’t need to. The sun baked the world in a sweltering, sticky 104 degrees, and if it hadn’t been so humid I’m pretty sure we all would have caught fire with the trees around us and gone up in a putrid blaze of prepubescent body odor, Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers, and burning wood on melting brass. Our fingerprints disappeared against the scorch of the metal most of us held, and some had been drinking so many fluids and sweating so profusely that they wet their pants and didn’t even notice, just welcomed the ensuing chill of it. But the heat? That was nothing. What’s a little heat stroke, a bit of sun poisoning? Get a hat and a nice spritzer-fan, and if you didn’t end up in the nurse’s office lying down on rice-paper-and-vinyl by the end of the day then you were fine enough.

It was Porky McPherson that clinched it. Hovering a good head over us at a whopping 5 feet 8 inches, Porky was not at all fat. She was just mean, tough, hard, spiky inside and out, like a porcupine. She dished out a hearty helping of helplessness and then scooped out a spoonful of anger and sprinkled on a bit of good old-fashioned fear for good measure. Her knuckles were forever scarred with a series of crescent moons sprawled out across them, “flesh wounds,” she called them—“and you should’ve seen the other guy.” Her black-as-tar hair was pulled back into a straight and spiky (as all good porcupines ought to have) mass of destruction. I’m not kidding. Brittany Sarver had to go to the nurse last week because Porky’s hair poked her eye until it bled. Porky’s pockets were always full of other kids’ lunch money—half of them kids who didn’t go to our school. Even her parents were afraid of her, which is why they left her alone and never helped her with her homework. But all those failing grades only made Porky angrier...which only made US more black and blue and broke.

For all of her foibles, Porky had one passion—she loved the trombone. And not just because she could slide the end of it into the head of the kids in front of her. That was only a perk. Porky just loved the sound of it. She loved spitting through the vibrations her mouth had to make to get the trombone to play. She loved knowing just where to slide the brass to in order to hit not only kids but notes. She loved the look of the long, slender, hard thing—I think if trombones could have spiky hair and stash lunch money away, then Porky would BE a trombone, but with skin.

Don’t start to like her. There’s no point. The trombone doesn’t save her, because it doesn’t save US. She empties the spit valve on the heads of the clarinet section, she purposefully steps on our toes as we try to march in formation (11-year-olds and big instruments just don’t mix well), she makes fun of everyone else as they try to play their parts, and when band practice is over she’s still Porky, but with some catching up in evilness to do.

Porky made EVERY day the worst day of ANYTHING in the history of ANYTHING.

But YESTERDAY was the worst day of band camp in the history of all band camps that ever were, because yesterday I chose to fight back.

I blame the heat. All that blood boiling just below my temples started my stomach to feeling queasy, and then my knees started to shake and my sunburned feet started to swell and before you knew it I was one sweaty and angry devil of a 13-year-old with mad delusions of power. I made my fatal mistake when Porky swung her long arm around to point to another kid and knocked me upside the head “on accident.” I’m pretty sure a blood vessel in my brain exploded, for nothing else could possibly explain my reaction:

I hit her back!

And now, dear reader, I am destined to die.

Writing Club: Item Description

For this prompt, we had to describe something without really saying what it was. I decided to put myself in the place of a beloved object of mine...



Well, I can say this much for myself: I ain’t no Cinderella.

For one thing, Cinderella had the chance to find her Prince and bear him a brood of royal, photogenic but otherwise very stupid children (I know this because their mother left no alternative). I was never meant to live so I can never die. Barren, void of life and re-productivity, what else is there for me to do?

Secondly, Cinderella’s looks got her a fairy godmother, fancy dress, and two glass slippers that were all her own. My looks (though my only virtue) got me a bucket of dust collecting on my head, tied to a stake awaiting a fire that will never come, and stuck sharing one too-big-for-me-glass-slipper with 20 other ones-of-my-kind. Tell me THAT’S fair.

What’s more, Cinderella got carried away to a grand and glorious castle while the evil beings who tried to control her got the boot in a big way. MY control freak still runs the place, and all I get a view of is everyone’s lazy self sitting on the sofa, not even paying attention to me at all, after all that work they put into me! I was made to be lovely and then forgotten.

Hmm…I wonder what the one with headphones is writing about. Maybe if I put a little more rouge on she’ll notice me and take me home and give me a breath of fresh air and a better view. Darn it! Why don’t I sweat prettily like my better selves do? I have no pheromones with which to attract a mate…or anything, for that matter…

Oh well. At least when everyone else here is rotting away sixty years from now in some burial ground, I’ll probably still be around to tell the tale. That’s the joy of being synthetic.

(I am the red silk flower sitting on the vase on the entertainment center in the living room of Celeste’s and Charissa’s apartment!)

Writing Club: A Clue Story

This was by far one of my favorite prompts, and I'm hoping we do it again. We each had to poll other people and gather together a random name of a person (real or fictitious, living or dead), a place, and an object. Then we exchanged these and used the random prompts to create the story of a crime scene. I think what I love MOST about these writing club nights is that we always come up with so many different ways to approach the same prompt, in every genre and format possible. This is especially true of this prompt. SO, without further ado:

July 22, 1987
Reporting by Celeste Darland

Onlookers in East London were shocked and horrified Tuesday night as beloved American baseball hall-of-famer Joe DiMaggio was led away in handcuffs after a bar brawl gone sour. At least two men were found dead and one other in critical condition, with the main suspect being DiMaggio himself.

“I was just at the Jack for a few tiddley’s when this Septic starts yellin’ all sorts of dickies and suddenly the whole room’s in an uproar,” Aiden Paisley, one witness to the night’s events, explains. “He probably came for a bender but now two blokes is hovis. Then the bottles took him away.”

When asked if he knew DiMaggio’s stature in American culture, Paisley’s only response was, “Sorry, I don’t get on the Liza that much.”

Clearly other Brits are not so ignorant. Protesters lined up outside of the jail cell only a few hours after the arrest, arguing DiMaggio’s innocence or immunity. Chief officials, however, are still interrogating their chief suspect and are not even considering release due to the severity of the crime and the incriminating evidence.

In an official statement released to the press Wednesday morning by the Scotland Yard, a number of witnesses recall DiMaggio allegedly “drinking ‘imself to pieces” and then yelling profanities when two young men came up to ask him for an autograph. DiMaggio threw his glass against the counter and attacked the men with his bare hands, which led several other bystanders into the brawl.

The next thing anyone knew, three bodies were lying on the barroom floor with blunt force trauma to the head and DiMaggio was holding his head in one hand and a bloody doorknob in the other.

“It’s the biggest lemon ‘round the Jack in years,” Paisley professes.

“I’m shocked, actually,” DiMaggio’s lifelong friend Armand Oliveri confides. “I’d never have pegged Joe for a killer, even in the foulest of tempers.”

“But he’s a classic example of the dangers of bottled-up aggression,” argues William Freedman, professor of psychiatry at Columbia and ardent critic of DiMaggio’s. “Sure, he’s a baseball legend and immortalized in every aspect of pop culture, but that was nearly five decades ago. Since then he’s seen the horrors of war, the hypocrisy of American idealism and being an ‘enemy alien’ in his own land, and two wives who he could never find the right balance for.”

“Marilyn (Monroe) did hit him hard,” Oliveri concedes. “But even then he was heartbroken, lost, not a raving lunatic.”

Evidence from key witnesses, however, suggests it was not the torment of his past that drove him to it. It was a mispronunciation of DiMaggio’s Italian name. “The kid pronounced his name wrong,” one American-born witness who wishes to remain anonymous claims. “Any true fan of Joe’s knows that it’s di-MAH-joh, not di-MAH-gee-oh like the media always says, and that he hates that. I guess with all the alcohol in him, he just couldn’t take one more idiot butchering his name.”

While the motive is still under investigation, the trial date yet to be slated, and fans across the world simultaneously disillusioned and driven to defend this American icon, one thing remains fairly certain:

It was Joe DiMaggio. In London. With a doorknob.