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Changes, changes

It's a quiet Friday night, and I'm waiting for a new recipe to finish baking in the oven, so I thought I'd sneak in a blog entry. This recipe is not very impressive or exciting (like the black bean and sweet potato chili I made for dinner), but I am expecting it to be delicious. Quick caramel rolls...yum. I'm making them cause I have a squeeze bottle full of caramel syrup and nothing to do with it. It's mostly just caramel and Pillsbury crescent rolls. This is the first blatantly unhealthy thing I've made this year, and I feel OK about that. So I'm just sitting here smelling my caramel-y delicious treat and thinking about my week.

It was a big week of changes at Urban Promise School, namely the departure of two teachers, which when you only had seven teachers to start with, is a big deal. They were the two first year teachers. One left for another job in a public school district, and one is going to be doing a different kind of work with the ministry. So just like that, I am once again the one with the least experience. It was a nice feeling to be counted among the experienced teachers and to dole out some advice, or at least "I've been there's" once and a while. I'm still processing how I feel about all of this, since we just got the news about one of the teachers today. I've been wondering if we'd had a responsible principal my first year of teaching, maybe she would have said this isn't working and pulled me out of the classroom. But then I also feel like I'm tough and I've gotten tougher through two really difficult years of teaching. I didn't back down even when I wanted to, and I stuck it out, and I'm still sticking it out.

Enough about that. I had a kind of funny experience on the playground on Monday. The Pre-K class was outside having recess with my class. There was a parent volunteer helping the Pre-K teacher, and so the Pre-K teacher was introducing him to me. She said, "This is Miss Seefeldt. She'll be your daughter's teacher next year." To which I immediately thought, "Uhh...no." I've been going back and forth about whether I should be applying to grad schools or looking for jobs or if I should just plan to stay at Urban Promise another year. But it was like in an instant, I knew that deep down, I did not want to stay another year. And this little girl is like the sweetest little girl, but I don't think I want to be a classroom teacher in this setting for another year. So maybe it's time to start looking at some other options. If I do decide to leave Urban Promise, it's going to be really hard. Plus, I'm not a fan of moving and new places and stuff like that. But we'll see. I might sign up to take the GRE's soon. A lot of the grad programs I've been looking into have January deadlines, which means I'll have to get moving and stop being a lazy lump after I get home from school.

Maybe I'd be more productive if I actually turned on the heat. But instead I sit in my 64 degree apartment wrapped up in blankets. But I know once I turn it on, it will basically have to stay on until the spring, and I know last year it was really expensive. So I'm putting it off.

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