Rock You Like A Hurricane

*Disclaimer* - The following two paragraphs are very similar to a user's manual. Since I said this, I'm sure half of you will skip ahead to the third paragraph. Go ahead... the first two paragraphs aren't interesting at all.

Well everyone, I promised myself and several others that I would blog about my life as a teacher for the next two years, so now's about a good a time to start as any. I plan to update at least every Sunday, but if I happen to get any interesting stories or information, you can expect more than one entry a week. The original plan was to create my own website with more than the "just a regular blog" feel, but I was unable to get my copy of DreamWeaver until recently. The other big holdup is that I won't be getting a paycheck until late September, and I don't see any reason to purchase a domain name and web space with money I don't have that could be used for food and water that keeps me alive.

As for a few more rules of this blog. I can't actually post any pictures of my students, or even their names for legal reasons, so I'll be referring to them much like Agent Friday did on Dragnet back in the day. Also, I'm not certain if I'm even allowed to say which school I'm working at on a public blog, but seeing that everyone that COULD potentially read this is someone that has my cell phone number, I'm not too worried about the school name (W.A. Todd). Should my website get more than a handful of readers or I become some internet phemon, I'll have to go back through and delete any potentially dangerous information. On this same token, should my students wander upon this website, I'd appreciate it if the comments were kept in good taste (I'm looking at you, friend) so it makes my life easier.



So I live in Mexico. Not literally, but for all intents and purposes it is. I live almost as far south in the U.S. as you can get without living in Brownsville. The border patrol is 60 miles north of me, and free trade zones abound. It's $.25 to go across the border into Mexico and $.50 to get back, and you don't even need a passport.

(The little yellow line here is the border. Sorry about the size of the photo, but that's about as good as I can do until I have my own website fixed up. The dots above the border are the towns I live in, work in, or drive through often.)

Palm trees abound, but there's also a fair amount of cacti littering the more remote areas. It's like South Texas can't decide if it wants to be tropical or an arid desert. At least while I've been here it's been much more tropical - the RGV (Rio Grande Valley) has seen record rainfall, which I had the pleasure of letting my car swim through.

(Reynosa, which you can see here, is a pretty nice tourist spot in Mexico, and is about 15 minutes away. RGV relies on it a lot to provide cheap labor for the economy.)

Seriously, this place can get rain for 10 minutes and the streets are flooded. This brings me to my next order of business - Hurricane Dean. I'm sure that most of you have heard in the news that Hurricane Dean is bearing down on South Texas and Mexico with all of nature's wrath. Should the hurricane hit, the entire RGV will most likely be wiped out as it's a floodplane that takes 2 and a half hours to drive from one end to the other. Because of all the construction and several decades of drought conditions, you never would have known that this area used to occassionally be an extension of the Rio Grande River or the Gulf of Mexico. I'm constantly bombarded with signs that tell me to "Keep Your Gas Tanks Full" since it's "Hurricane Season". I think this is pretty good advice, but then again, the Texas Department of Transportation has managed to close an entire highway on me with no detour signs directing me to an alternative route (and on a day where I was taking my teacher registration test, no less!). Oh, TDOT has also come up with the gem, "YOU DRINK DRIVE, YOU LOSE" that can be seen on the way back from South Padre Island. Everyone else has decided to take TDOT's advice though, and gas rose 20 cents a gallon today. It's still at reasonable levels, but should Dean hit Galveston as a few TX media outlets have predicted (on no real statistics), "gas could rise to $7 a gallon and collapse the entire U.S. Economy!" Right... right. Well, I'm not particularly worried, as the current path of the hurricane has it hitting the Yucatan and just barely grazing my newfound home.



The Weather Channel seems to have a good handle on things, and the locals all say that RGV has about 3 hurricane warnings a year, but they haven't been hit in something like 100 years. "It's bound to happen!" - fearmonger. I'm not too terribly worried. My car works, I have renter's insurance, and I have until Thursday when this sucker hits ground. I find it strange to think about the items that I would definitely need to take with me, but there really aren't that many items: it's mostly paintings, important papers, and photos. I'll keep you all updated on the Hurricane though, and if I'm forced to evacuate.

Too Cool For School
School starts a week from tomorrow. Some of my students *might* be there. From what all the other teachers have told me, I can expect class sizes from 7-12 students the first few days. By the end of the third week, I'll probably have over 20 in each class. A lot of my students will most likely be from migrant families and other towns, as Donna (my school district) has a population of 14,000 and my 9th grade academy will have over 1,000 students. I highly doubt that 7% of the city population is attending 9th grade. I'm really looking forward to teaching though. Houston was a blast, and I feel like I can really make a difference in my students' lives. I'll be teaching English, but I'm hoping to incorporate multimedia and have my students turn their readings and writings into animations, movie shorts, or slideshows. I got the idea from the iLife Challenge and a professor I saw at a conference who teaches a class called Writing with Video. Apparently I have a good chance of getting grant money, because while the building is old and there aren't many funds for books, there's a bit of money for technology and not a lot of people are taking advantage of it. At least that's the word on the street. I still have to actually apply for the things, but I'm just happy that my chances of receiving funding are greater than zero.

If there's one thing I've learned from this summer, it's that "professional training" can eat up your entire life. I've been in training 10 of the last 12 days, and by the time school starts, I will have had an average of 8 hours of training for 16 of 19 days. That's right - I only get Sundays off. I do it for the kids though... and Sunday has never felt more relaxing. We've had training for lesson planning, assessment, accountability, special needs, lesson planning and unit planning, expectations, legal jargon, sexual harrassment training, and everything else under the sun. There has been so many acronyms thrown at me that I'm starting to think the military uses less. There's TFA, IEP, LPT, RSAT, IRL, ESL, ELL, DISD, LSSP, TSTA, NEA, AEIS, PAID, PEIMS, TAKs, TEKs, TAAS, TEAMs, NCEC, CIP, and enough others to make my head explode just thinking about it. At one point I asked a question about the acronym ADB because, well, every other capitalized word was an acronym, and I got a confused look from my instructor who told me it wasn't an acronym at all - it was a code. Lovely. Now I get to learn how to tell the difference between acronyms and codes. Training really wasn't that bad though. Our meals were more or less paid for by various teacher associations wanting us to join, and I got some cool schwag: not one, but two mousepads, several bajillion pens, two bags (one is really freaking cool and has my school district logo on it), cookies, markers, hi-lighters, and a couple of coupons to different restaurants. I was slightly depressed that I didn't win any raffles, because they were giving out tons of gift cards to Target, Jason's Deli, and Wing Stop. Every day I'd look longingly at my meager stub of a ticket, hearing those first two numbers called out to the delight of my body and soul, only to have the last number, usually a "3" or "9" called out as all hope was lost. Oh well. There's always next week.