Archive May 26, 2014

I miss you my family and friends in heaven. I miss you so much.

I miss you with every bone in my body

I figured it was easier with the newly diagnosed brain injury to co teaching because I did not know what I could do and I know numbers don’t make sense right now, so Maragrat makes up for my deficits and she’s there when I get tired. They only found the injury the week school started even though I have had symptoms from the multiple concussion I had the last school year. November, April and May. In May that’s when I got really hurt …. But school had already started by the time tests and results were gotten, so the doctors told me to go to work and keep a journal of what I couldn’t do. After going to the traumatic brain injury unit for testing in January……it took 4-6 months for an appointment for the traumatic brain injury center. The doctor told me I should not have gone back to work at all….but I didn’t know that then. It took eight week just to get the appointment for the results and another six months to schedule the appointment.

The school lost just about everything last year, no music, gym, computer, library or art teachers at all. No one to run the library so we are not allowed to use it. We can use the computer lab but no one to keep the old old computers going, mean a lot are broken , have errors, or are so slow it just frustrates the kids to use them. We have one teachers aide for the whole school. They adopted a new reading text book last year but put no money into workbooks so we do not have those. The workbook has the spelling English and writing in it along with the reading pages and I have been running it off but I have to buy my own paper as the school buys nothing. I have to buy every supply, everything I use and this year there were not enough chairs so I went to walmart and bought $10 stools because I brought all the spare chairs I had from home. I like painting chairs so I had a collection. Then there are no breaks so I don’t get to go to the bathroom unless thirty kids come with me and there is not recess and when it starts to snow there will be no breaks at lunch either as there is no one to plow the playground and the won’t let them outside. Not pleasant working conditions. Then whe you add the dangerous mean and fighting students it’s unbearable.

Today we got our chemo, we are getting to make many friends with our treatment staff. The staff is very nice to us. Coffee remains in total clinical remission and we have 5 treatments a and 6 weeks left to go.

Coffee with her hospital and on

Dean Winchester
Supernatural

“You never give up on family”

I guess everyone I know understands I am a 24 fan. I a, so glad it is back on television. I love it. I watched Kiefer in Touch but I can say it was still a lot running around finding answers but I missed the fun. Missed the gun in his hand. I am a person who has seen guns do a lot of damage to my inner city students lives but 24 is make believe and Jack Bauer is one of my favorite character…….actually Coffee was suppose to be Bauer – Gibbs , but she named herself Coffee.

I know as a Drug Free Schools Coordinator for 20 years that guns are bad but hey have a little fun once in awhile

This year I share a classroom with a nice teacher and we get along well. We met five minutes before the kids walked in the door, so we have sort of gotten to know each other “on the job”. The governor pulled a lot of funding last up year, the school’s had what is called a class size reduction program. One teacher to a fifteen to eighteen kids but since Milwaukee did not have enough classrooms for that program they doubled up and put two teachers in one class. So for the last six years I have had 15-18 kids and half a classroom. We put a wall down the middle of the room, but the school had no money for a wall, so I paid $600 and bought medal cabinets to make a wall. Then last year the school did not have enough kids so I had eighteen first graders in my own whole classroom, and this year it was suppose to be just me and thirty kids but at the very last minute they found extra money and put our ratio of 15 to 1 back. I did not take the cabinets home, I just pushed them against the wall…..teachers should not need to buy their own furniture! As my classroom was already set up, I decided to co teach. The thing is in the last two weeks I have been here setting up, I have had five teachers assigned to his room to co teach. I have cleaned out cabinets five times so they would have room and put the stuff back as soon as they went to another room……because in between I was told I’d have substitutes with me. Not portable either way I worked all summer getting really for 30 kids by myself again and even though I was sick all summer, I worked anyway.

I have been an inner city teacher for 26 years. 4 years before that as a substitute. Not easy but the kids always needed me and I worked close to home so I could drive home for lunch and take care of mom, dad, whoever needed taking care of and no one went to a nursing home. So I was lucky that way. I could set them up with supplies they needed, go to work. Eat a sandwich driving back and forth at lunch, set them up with supplies for the afternoon give them lunch let out the dog or dogs and then drive back to work. I could eat half a sandwich of the sandwich each way. all Then pack up everything I needed to do and come home, make them dinner, and sit on the floor wherever they were do all my teacher school work. When they went to bed I would clean the house or part of it and then start all over again the next day. It worked. I am grateful no one went to a nursing home.