Pre-Spring Break Depressing Life

So many of you blog stalkers may note that between last fall and Spring Break my blog posts were seriously lacking. During that time period, Jarred and I began working on our National Boards for work. In a nutshell, every eight years we need to re-certify as teachers. There are a number of options, National Boards is the most difficult as it's a National Certification program where we must document various aspects of our teaching. It is a content specific program and of all the shit we must wade through to receive certification, this program is the most valid and truly makes one examine their practices. The downside? It must be done by March 31- or within a year of signing up for the program. This means four 13 page papers written in an odd style I will never duplicate, two videos of me teaching my kids, an ass load of student work samples and an entire paper about my outside-of -teaching but teaching related accomplishments- basically a 13 page resume. Needless to say, any free time we had, ended late last fall. Being the busy people we are, we tried to maintain our active lifestyle, work and still work on National Boards. Tough life. We submitted our portfolios on March 31, still have a test to take and will find out if we are among the 40% of the applicants who actually pass. If we don't pass? The process starts over again the following year (or we just go get a job w/out any responsibility). The other depressing part of this process is that because of the Washington state budget (more specifically in part because Washingtonians won't pass a pop and candy tax) the compensation teachers receive for being Nationally Board certified was nixed this year. I realized it's above and beyond teacher salary's and in tough times, everyone has to sacrifice, but I believe this is a huge sacrifice. National Board certified teacher REALLY are good teachers and deserve compensation (to their already meager salaries) just like those bankers deserve compensation. While sitting in front of the computer for hours on end, we were able to take small breaks. Jarred's sister, Jenese, gave us a hoola-hoop for our birthdays and we had a lot of fun with that thing.