Kindergarten!

School has started and I still think it's a little crazy that I'm a real teacher now and I'm in charge of my own class. Things have been a little crazy and I have never felt so drained in my life but everything is going wonderfully. I love my students, my school and the great people I work with. Although it is difficult, I wouldn't change it for the world!!

I'm super excited to show off my classroom! I have always wanted my own place to decorate any way I wanted and to be organized in my own crazy obsessive way and I'm so proud of it. I realized that I did forget to take a picture of one of my favorite parts but I'll do that next week and post about it later. I hope you like my class!

 This is the board outside my classroom. If you can't tell those little people are Thing 1 and Thing 2 from the Dr. Seuss book made out of the children's hand prints. I got the idea from Pinterest and the children loved it! 

 Sorry this isn't the best picture because I took it with instagram but it's the only one I have. I decided to name the tables after different Dr. Seuss books. I was going to hang the cover of the books over their tables but I guess that's not allowed at my school so I settled for putting them on the pencil holder thingies. It turned out pretty cute.

 The outside of my door. Not like you couldn't tell or anything. haha!

 Since one of our standards is for all kids to know their colors I wanted to hang up color sings in my class but I wanted them to match the theme so I made this.

 You can't really tell but these are our classroom rules and they are also Dr. Seuss themed. I got them at the Utah Idaho Supply Store. The kids love them and I have found myself saying "put on your elephant ears this is super important to listen to" because of the pictures on one of these posters.

 We did this the first week of school. I read the kids "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" and had them color letters in the Alphabet to make our own tree. I made it bright colors so it still fits in with the Dr. Seuss theme even though it's really not. The kids love looking at the letters and telling which ones they colored.

 My birthday wall.

 This is where I display my student's work. Those little hats were made by some of my 6th grade summer school students. A few of them were really excited to help me decorate my room and would stay in from recess to help me do things. It was great. And now every morning I have a group of 6th graders coming in asking if they can do little things. I have really enjoyed their help and I have a feeling that once it starts to get cold more and more of the kids will be coming in begging to help me.

This is my discipline chart. It's my Dr. Seuss-ed version of the old green-yellow-red behavior chart. I thought it was a cute way to fit in with the theme and it works really well.

I have a few more cute things that I'll have to take pictures of another time but pretty much that's my classroom. It's all very organized and clean just the way I like it so I'm loving it. Hope you like it too!!!!

Different kind of racist

For the most part I try to be a really nice, caring and thoughtful person. I hate the idea of hurting somebody’s feelings and in many situations I’ll go out of my way to avoid it. There are always the people who push my buttons to the limit and I just don’t care what they think, but in general I try not to offend people or make them think negatively of me. Which is why I HATE when people get to know me and tell me that when we first met they thought I was a snobby, stuck-up, bratty, stupid, careless, spoiled or whatever other horrible thing they thought of me.

Recently I have had people in a few different situations apologize to me for judging me in this manner. I always ask what I did to make them think so negatively without getting to know me. The response is always the same, I didn’t do anything they just assumed I was that way. I could understand somebody judging me in this negative manner if when we met I was laughing at somebody’s misfortune, bragging about how much I paid for my shoes or something stupid like that but it doesn’t seem to ever be something I did. The response I always get is something to the effect of, “I just looked at you and knew your type.”

This makes me so mad my skin just boils!! If I told somebody of a different race that I just looked at them and knew their type people would jump all over me telling me that I was a horrible racist bigot. But it is ok to look at a blonde California girl and think she is stupid, spoiled and stuck-up? Although I may not be discriminated against in the same way I feel like this is a kind of racism and people who do this are just plain mean!!

The only some what reasonable explanation anybody has given me for their horribly mean judgment was from my “friend” who for the purposes of this post I’ll call Jared (that may or may not be his real name, haha). After we got to know each other pretty well and he realized I wasn’t a bratty stuck-up girl, Jared told me that the reason he thought so badly of me was because I had never gone up to talk to him after we had met in the hot tub of our apartment complex. I asked him if he had ever thought that maybe I was just shy. He told me and I do quote, “pretty girls aren’t allowed to be shy, it’s part of the obligation of being pretty for them to go out of their way and make sure people don’t feel inferior.”

Why would somebody look at a good looking person and feel that they are inferior? It seems to me that somebody who feels that way values looks way to much and it’s more of their own fault than it is of the “pretty” person’s fault.

I’m not exactly sure how I fit into this “pretty” mold but I’m flattered that some people think I do. What I don’t like is the negative judgments some people hold against me without getting to know me. It really hurts my feelings. In every situation the person who told me they thought so low of me was somebody that I didn’t know very well but I did like. I know I shouldn’t hold grudges against people but when I hear that somebody looked at me and judged me I find it really hard to not just think of this person as mean, rude and just plain not somebody I want to be friends with. I feel like when somebody looks at me or anybody else and judges them this way they are hypocritical because obviously they hold those qualities themselves.