Third Place

This is just a quick follow-up to my last post. My group and I were chosen as finalists in the Innovative Instruction Competition and had to/got to (depending on your perspective) present in front of the panel of judges with six other teams. It was pretty scary, but in the end we won 3rd place! Even though there were only about 14 teams total that entered, I feel so excited that our hard work paid off. They are also going to have a people's choice contest where people can vote for one of the finalists and the team with the most votes gets iPads. So... I'll let you all know when it starts so you can vote for us. :) I'm not sure if the voting is going to be open to anyone, just BYU students, or just students in the school of education. But once I find out I will definitely be publicizing it!

Innovative Instruction Competition

Much of my time this week has been consumed by working on an entry for this new competition at BYU. This semester I am taking a class about teaching with technology, so I had to create a project anyway, but this added a little incentive: There is a $4,000 grand prize, and $2,000 and $1,000 prizes for runners-up. This week we put together our video pitch and we thought it would just take a few hours. Boy, were we wrong. It ended up taking us over 12 hours to film and edit our 3 and a half minute video! Anyway, technology is fun and interesting but it can definitely be time consuming! I don't know what our chances are in the competition because a lot of the teams came up with some great stuff. However, I learned a lot and I think our video turned out pretty sweet (even though I look like a weirdo in the clips of me talking--just ignore that!)

Making plans

Dear blogging world:

I definitely kept you in suspense with that last post, huh? Well, pretty much I have just been trying to keep my head above water this semester in school. Luckily, this is sort of my last semester. It is my last full-load-on-campus semester, anyway. I will probably need to wrap up a couple classes over the summer and then in the fall I will be spending my days at... (drumroll...) ...Mapleton Junior High, teaching seventh grade English. I am super excited. I am doing an internship, which is awesome for two reasons. Reason # 1: I don't have to do regular student teaching (hooray!!!!) Although I have had good experiences with my practicum teaching, it's just difficult to teach in someone else's classroom to someone else's students. Which brings me to Reason # 2: I finally get to have my own classroom. Throughout all of my education classes I have been really anxious to put everything into practice, design my own units, etc. For this first year there is a framework already set up, but I will be the one deciding how to tweak it. Anyway, this is very exciting for me. I asked my ninth grade brother for advice about teaching seventh grade and he told me, "Just remember that they're crazy and they're sevies." (Sevies is the junior high equivalent of squashmores, I'm pretty sure it's a new invention since when I was in junior high.) Anyway, from what I have seen so far, I think he is pretty much right. Luckily I like craziness so I think this next year will be a BLAST!

In other news, Michael just got back from a week in New York City. He went with the other Graphic Design BFA students to see how the business is in NYC. It is a little bit funny because before the trip he was 99% sure he wanted to find a job in NYC after he graduates, but now he is having second thoughts. He decided that the simple life is not so bad after all! Still, he had a good time and it is definitely still a possibility for us sometime in the future.... we are just really not sure right now. But, I am excited to at least have this next year planned (finally.) After that, who knows!

I'm back!

I have been inspired to update my blog, but the only problem is I don't know what to say. I think blogging is usually more effective when there is something exciting or humorous to share with the world. All I've got right now is that if you haven't seen this video yet, you should definitely check it out:



More to come later... this is just a little teaser to foreshadow my return to the blogging world!

Cheesy vs. Classy

What I am

What I want to become?

So, I am having a life dilemma. For pretty much all of my life, I have been what you would call a cheesy person. I like weird and random things and I make a lot of jokes that no one understands. It was pretty much the bomb.com. Now, all of the sudden, I am grown up and I have an interest in becoming classy. For example, I want to do insane things like sew or make crafts. The problem is, I have no idea how to accomplish this transformation, or if I even should. Maybe there are some positives about being cheesy. Anyway, I need some advice from all you classy people out there... how do you do it?

Wake up call

Yesterday I found out that a friend from high school was killed in a car accident. I hadn't really kept in touch with him since he left for his mission, but the news of his passing has really impacted me. Most of my memories of him are kind of blurry in my mind by now, but the one thing that really sticks out is his smile. I remember him as always being so cheerful and friendly to everyone around him. At this point, my heart is just aching for his poor wife. I've never met her, but in looking through some of their pictures together it is obvious that they were a great match. They clearly loved each other and brought a lot of happiness into each others' lives. To top it off, they just recently had a sweet baby girl. The last post in their blog before the accident was of him and his daughter together, with the caption, "daddy's girl." It just breaks my heart that their time together had to be cut so short.
All in all, it's been a big lesson for me that you never know how much time you will have to share your love with those around you. I also have to say that I feel like I've been through some really difficult trials over the last few years, but I just can't imagine passing through one like this. It makes me realize the ways I have been blessed without realizing it. Through everything we have gone through as a couple, I am so grateful to have Michael in my life. I know he will be a great father when the time comes and I am just praying that we will be able to grow old together and share our lives with each other. I guess sometimes life just doesn't go the way you plan. Anyway, you can probably see that I am having a hard time understanding why these kind of things have to happen, but I was just talking about how writing can be a great way to process emotions in my teaching writing class, so I thought, hey, why not give it a shot?

A New Post!

Welcome, gentle reader. I decided it's about time for a new post, since the customer service rant has been at the top for quite some time now, and it's not very inviting. However, I don't really have much to say lately. We are pretty much all moved in by now, that's pretty exciting. Tomorrow I am going to be done with all the classes for my TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) endorsement which I have been working on this summer. I have to say I am overjoyed with that occurrence. Other than that, not much is happening. I have been on a big reading kick lately and Mike has even joined in the spirit a little bit, which is fun. Usually while I'm in school I feel like I don't have time to read for enjoyment, but this term I have been reading anyway and I also get a chance to read more at my library job these days which is fun. Recently I have read the following books, most of them are young adult for my reviews with a couple exceptions: Wuthering Heights, La Línea, Catcher in the Rye, Thirteen Reasons Why, Tales of Terror from the Black Ship, The Locked Garden, Tales from Outer Suburbia, Wintergirls, If I Stay, Feed... and that's all that comes to mind at the moment. Currently I am trying to read some new YA books as well as read every well-known classic that I always hear about but haven't read. It's kind of embarrassing to be an English major and then not get some reference to a very popular book. So pretty much, I am trying to cover all of bases. It's kind of exciting. It's also kind of ridiculous how many books are in that category even though I have been studying literature for 5 years in college and all of junior high/high school. It makes sense though, because obviously there are way more books out there than I could ever actually begin to read. But I am trying to hit most of the highlights. Any suggestions?