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This site began as a grad school project for an Ed. Tech. class in 2005 and has since become a place for me to experiment and play with a web site. It's not much, but it's fun!

Polly Sawyer. September 4, 2010

Years.

It’s been years and I haven’t done much with these pages, apart from moving them out of Dreamweaver and over to iWeb. It was an easy move and I wouldn’t go back. Dreamweaver was too hard! Everything still looks the same but it is soooo much easier to add content, move things around and play with photos and text. It’s so easy I’ve even designed the school’s web site on iWeb.

Impatience gets ugly.

When I was little, around nine or ten, my sister was a stewardess (that’s how long ago this was) with Northwest Orient Airlines (again, that’s how long ago this was). She made some trips to Japan and on one trip she bought me a little wooden figurine with the character for “patience” carved into its belly. Even then it was clear that I had no patience. I still have that cool little figurine. I still have a photo of Beck in her stew outfit. I’m still that impatient ten year old.

  Thesis Troubles.

Now that I’ve finally finished my thesis, I’m free to do more fun things! Aiya! My life was miserable this summer. I had to start and finish my thesis in two months. the deadline was due to the fact that my Initial Teaching Certificate expired June 30th. You cannot teach without one in the Anchorage School District. In order to get your first

Professional Teaching Certificate, you need institutional recommendation. Institutions won’t give them out unless you’ve finished all your required work. The thesis is required for the Master of Arts in Teaching. Do you see what I’d done to myself? Yes, stupid, I know. But my thesis topic was not viable when I was student teaching, so I changed during my first year of teaching and found that the new topic wasn’t viable either! Crap. So there I was in April, frantically emailing my advisor to find out what to do. I took a class, wrote my paper, was demoted by the district to substitute pay, lost my insurance and waited while my committee worked my thesis over. Now I’m waiting for the state to just issue the certificate so that I can get my pay and insurance back. I hate waiting. 

Anyway.

I’m still teaching and that is what matters. My class is loud. Noisy. Talkative. Hard to train. 2nd and 3rd graders. They are mostly independent learners, not necessarily the high students, but many are. They wear me out by 3:30, but I wouldn’t trade what I do for any other profession. Each night, after school is out and most teachers have gone home, I stand there and just breathe in the smell of the school. It sounds weird, sure, but my sense of smell is the sense that creates and recalls the most memories for me. There is just something wonderful about smell of the janitor’s cleaner drifting up and down the warm, quiet halls. Incredible. At that point, I say to myself, “I love this job. I love this job.” Three years in and it’s all good. Here is my class doing what they do best at this early point in the year: ignoring directions and doing their own things.