I’m a teacher.  I teach in a special education resource room at an urban elementary school.  I teach reading, math, written language, and social/emotional skills to an awesome group of students who have all been identified as having a disability that impacts their education.  Folks seem to get what it means to teach reading, math, and writing.  It’s the social skills part that gets confusing.  Usually I break it down into two categories: “How not to get punched at recess” (aka, peer interactions) and “How to keep your teacher from hating you” (aka, appropriate classroom behaviors).   I think about my own sparkling set of social skills and try to use that as some kind of curriculum. I’ve never been punched at recess…hmmm…how did I manage that?  Usually the conversations go like this, “Remember when you spit in her hair?  When people spit on me, I don’t usually want to hang around them anymore.  If you want people to want to be around you, should you spit on them?”  The expected answer is no, you should not spit on them.  Shockingly, that’s not always the response I get.   It’s conversations like this that make me wonder about people who work in offices.  What do they talk about all day?  The pros and cons of nose-picking?  Gosh, I hope not.

At this point, I’ve been at this job for about 6 years.  However, I’ve been me for a smidgen over 28 years.  And while a lot of my time right now is consumed with teaching, it isn’t my whole life.  I’ve got family and friends I love, places I go, things I do and see.  Expect to see a lot about my classroom, but expect to see some of me, too.