More to life

There is more to life than my health – and Barbara’s. I swear there is. I guess it’s time to catch up again on other things.

Antoinette and I are still broken up. We’ve shifted the form of our relationship, though, and are being friends. We’ve been getting together about once a week. I love her and miss some of what we had together, yet I know this is for the best. We just didn’t work together as romantic partners. She’d be a great partner for someone more like her. If I knew that guy, I’d recommend her to him.

So, once again I'm open to meeting the woman of my dreams. I hope I learned what I need to know from being with Antoinette so that I'm ready to find her now. If you know her, send her my way, please.

I'm still teaching AVID and English at Capitol High School as a long-term substitute. Channell (the regular teacher who is out on maternity leave) returns on November 21. She’d like me to stay on as co-teacher to facilitate the transition until winter break. (I almost called it Christmas break.) We have to see if the school or the school district will pay me to do that.

I love that job. It’s a lot of work for not too much pay, but I still love it. I guess teaching is just my calling. Whenever I do life purpose work, I always get that teaching is my life’s work. I’ve always taken that very broadly. Now I'm actually doing school teaching and loving it. Interesting. I just act as if that’s my permanent job – going to all of the meetings whether I need to or not, etc. We shall see.

October 21 was the end of the first quarter. Giving midterm exams, grading them, and preparing grades for the quarter took a huge amount of time. Now I find that I still have some to do because the grades can be changed, and some of the students want to do things to change their grades. I'll have to put some kind of time limit on that, or else I'll be doing it forever.

Some of it is quite challenging – especially dealing with kids who create disruption and ones who aren’t at all motivated. But I'm learning.

Another of the long-term subs (the one who took over the classes I was originally scheduled to teach – his name is Eric) told me that Los Alamos Public Schools is looking for subs and says they can keep us busy. It’s 40 minutes or so away from home, but it pays about twice what Santa Fe Public Schools does. I'm going to call about it and see if I can get a long-term job there. Eric and I could carpool and make it easier and more enjoyable to commute.

It’s time for me to check back in with Santa Fe Community College about being in their alternative teacher training program. I'm still interested in becoming a regular teacher and in teaching AVID permanently. It’s a fabulous program. If you’d like to know more about it, visit http://www.avidonline.org. I’ve also learned that there’s a program to prepare teachers to teach advanced placement (AP) courses. I'm looking into that, too. To know more about that, see http://apcentral.collegeboard.com. AVID and AP courses are what I really want to teach.

What else? There must be more. I'll write another message if I think of anything.

Love and light to you all,
Michael