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Showing posts from 2012

It's Not About State's Rights: An Argument for Common Core

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I did not attend school in just one state. I spent five years in eastern Michigan, two years in Illinois, five years in Wyoming, and two years back in Michigan, this time on the west coast of the state. Growing up I had a decent education, spotty at times, but never consistent. Some schools and states were more rigorous than others, and while I graduated from high school with a 3.9 GPA, I can't say that I was entirely prepared for college. There were gaps, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of those gaps were a result of my inconsistent education for 13 years (if I include preschool). The expectations on me as a student changed with each move, and now as an adult, a parent, and a teacher myself, I wonder if things would have been different had there been consistent expectations across the country. Every four years politicians pay lip service to the issue of education, promises are made, vague ideas presented, and once the election is over, little changes. This year it appear

Unwanted Tenants

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Scratch, scratch, thump, thump, thump, thudump . Not again . At least, that's what I was thinking last week when I heard that sound over our bedroom two mornings in a row, the sound of an unwanted visitor waking me up at 4 A.M. Then earlier this week, while I was peacefully eating my early morning breakfast, I saw a mouse scurry around the corner of our dining room. Yep, here we go again. Our "adventures" with unwanted tenants began immediately after we moved into the house. Actually, it would be safe to say that it started before we even moved into the house. "Sarah, I think you have some bugs in your drawers." My mother-in-law was helping me clean the long vacated kitchen. I looked into the drawer. "Mom, those are mouse droppings." Unfortunately, I was familiar with the signs of those tiny vermin. Two winters in a row we found a couple mice finding their way through our crawl space in Indy into the house. We learned how to go after them

True Modern Republican and Christian?

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For the last week I have watched the RNC, partially because I feel more than ever the need to be fully informed before I vote in November and partially because I assigned watching both conventions to my AP classes. And as I've watched the convention, and listened to the various commentary surrounding the convention, my personal struggle with American politics continues to grow. I did not grow up in a particularly political household. My maternal grandmother was a diehard Kennedy Democrat, but my parents, who do regularly exercise their right to vote, raised us with values that most closely resemble those of the Republican party. I have assumed for years, based on occasional discussions at home, that my parents tend to vote Republican. I, however, have desired to consider myself an Independent, mostly because I don't want to be tied down to any particular political party. I agree with different ideas spouted off by members of both parties and try to vote for the individual who

At Least the Mortgage is Paid, Right?

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At least, this is what Jeff and I have been trying to say to ourselves for the last two years. We knew that a move to another city and attempts to sell our house in a market that was still dropping was going to be difficult. As difficult as it has been for several reasons, we don't regret our move to Fort Wayne. It has been good for both of us professionally, our family has more time together, and God shows us over and over that this is where we are supposed to be. But that doesn't change the fact that our second house still sits in Indianapolis, unsold and currently occupied by a second renter. Seven years ago we bought what was supposed to be our second starter house when we moved to Indy. We couldn't afford to buy our "dream" house, and so the hope was that we would buy a cheaper house with little money down, avoid spending money on rent that we would never see back, and after five years or so, we would sell our house at a profit and take any other money that

Creation of a Mancave: The Beginning

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While I never liked the window in the shower of our bathroom, Jeff and I loved the basement in our first house. It really wasn't anything special, but it was the place the two of us and our young dog spent most of our time. In the three years that we lived near Gary, IN, two of which were in our first house, we lived in Indiana and every day I drove towards Chicago to teach on the far south side and Jeff drove the opposite direction to Michigan. We were young and childless and by the time we both crashed at home, we frequently cooked something easy, or probably more often got carry out, and took our food to the basement to eat dinner and relax before crashing in bed long before we do now. Our house had a living room and a dining room that were rarely used. Instead, the table upstairs became storage for my school work and bills and the basement became our dining and living room. We started to devise grand plans for the basement, but we moved away from the house long before we had th

Coming to Terms With Using Daycare: A Working Mother Reflects

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It is important to understand my background. I am the oldest of four girls and my mom stayed home with all of us. Growing up I played on my own, with my occasionally willing and available mother, and with neighbor kids when they were available. At least this was my life until I was I was in preschool, where I excitedly got to play with kids my own age. I was one of the only girls in my preschool class, and while I have a few very close girlfriends, I honestly get along better with boys, which I blame on that first year of school when I spent an entire year of preschool playing He-Man and playing He-Man's girl friend, although I don't remember her name. Please notice that "girl" and "friend" are separated by a space. With that upbringing I spent my entire life believing that I would also be a SAHM, gladly doing my duty to raise my large family (at the time I was thinking 4-5 kids) with my husband. Fast forward nearly 30 years after this initial fantasy star

The Painted Wallpaper Disaster: Our Little Girl's Bedroom

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When you are blinded by possibility, sometimes you fail to notice the little things that will make all the difference in your house renovations. Such appears to be my story with the wallpaper in our house. I will get to the wallpaper in the master bedroom, which was actually finished first, later. Today I will discuss the painted wallpaper disaster. The first time we walked through our house we had our eyes on the big things, such as the disaster of the kitchen, three bathrooms, the future family room, the basement, you get the picture. And as I get caught up on writing about the improvements made on the house in the last two years, and the improvements that we continue to make, this picture will become even clearer. What we didn't pay attention to were the "little" things. Like the fact that the master bedroom and living room had wallpaper and that someone had painted over the wallpaper in the bedroom that would become our daughter's. As offers and negotiations wer

Should I Really Post That? The Current Rhetoric of Social Media

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While I have strong political feelings that I willingly share with my husband, close friends, and certain family members, I typically try to stay out of the social media political frenzy. This is for several reasons. First and probably foremost, I am an avoider and people pleaser. I want to keep people happy and more often than not I keep my mouth shut to do so, even if not telling it like it is makes me miserable. I say this as more of a confession than a revelation of a positive personality trait. Quite frankly, while this trait has helped me in the area of self-preservation for years, I consider it one of my main personality flaws. However, this particular personality trait has allowed me to maintain friends of different political affiliations without conflict. Second, I get tired of the virtual shouting match that occurs between the far left and the far right and I have no desire to be a part of it. Third, I believe that it is my duty as a high school teacher to teach my students h

The Purple People Eater

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There is no better way to describe the room that would become our guest room. It is difficult to decide where to start in describing the room. Pictures do it some justice, but not enough. The royal purple walls were spattered in several places with what we believe were beverages. Several places had pink, not white trim, and there is a second closet in the room with a door painted the same royal purple as the walls. The carpet was disgusting, smelly, and when it was pulled out of the room we discovered wood floors that were in much better shape than we could have hoped for. A previous resident believed him or herself enough of an artist that there were a couple pictures drawn around the room, the most noticeable of which is captured in one of the pictures below. In short, the room was a mess, but it became the first bedroom that we touched for a couple reasons.  1) It appeared that it would be the easiest of the rooms to complete, and we needed something that could be quickly compl

Finding Distractions From the Bathroom

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That seems to be the story of our weekend. While I did finish grout on the wall tile and got that much closer to having the bathroom done, we found a couple tasks to distract from getting the walls completely finished.  We have two very old garage door openers. Or at least, we HAD two very old garage door openers, but in the last week, one of them finally quit. We are determined to do things right  and as we have money, replacing things as they quit. That has happened with light fixtures and this weekend that happened with the garage door opener that quit. A Friday night trip to Sears as a family and Jeff was determined to spend Saturday cleaning the garage and putting up the new opener. We were exchanging our dead chain garage door opener for a much quieter belt garage door opener. I watched and played with the kids outside on the playset while Jeff worked all day in the garage. Our son did get to "help" for a little while, and was pretty filthy by the time he came in for a

The Pink Monstrosity: The Vanity

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Our carefully selected bathroom vanity met with near disaster in the spring of 2011. All of our bathroom items were purchased and safely stored in our garage. Or at least I believed they were safely stored in our garage. Then we had a particularly heavy rain. Heavy rains should never be a problem. Our driveway is sloped towards the house, but we have excellent drains that take care of the rain and it rarely causes huge puddles in front of the house and family room door. UNLESS those drains are plugs by yard debris. On this particular day, they were plugged by yard debris, and a lot of it. By the time I checked outside, we had a small lake in front of our garage doors and our family room door. (We have two front entrances. The main entrance goes up stairs to our living room and the second entrance is ground level leading to the family room, which, according to our best guess, was originally the garage before one of many additions to the house.) Increasingly pregnant, I was not the most

Getting Our Piece of the Bailout

In 2008 my husband and I, along with the rest of our fellow Americans, watched with frustration as the big banks spiraled out of control, eventually being granted bailouts that kept them from failing, and then continued to be frustrated as those same banks appeared to be wasting taxpayer money to give the very same individuals who made the decisions that caused the banks to spiral out of control millions of dollars to supposedly "keep talent". We read the articles in the newspaper, magazines, and online, and yes, we faithfully stayed up later than we should have to watch Stewart and Colbert (I do not miss the irony in the fact that as a teacher who teaches rhetoric I prefer their take on the media mess). And then we watched as houses in our working middle class neighborhood went up for sale and then didn't sell. Our neighbors on one side had their house on the market in 2005 when we moved to Indianapolis just as the bubble started to burst. They had just built their dre