Wait... You want to hire me

Note to self: When blogger asks "are you sure you want to be directed away from this page cause it's maybe not saved..." HIT NO. Oh well. Here goes take 2.

About this time last summer I had the same moment of realization/panic. I went from... "crap, crap, crap I need a job!" to "crap, crap, crap I have a job!" I have focused so much on getting a teaching job this summer that I forgot that if I did actually get one (which sometimes I had my doubts), I would actually have to DO IT. Not that I'm not excited, I am, it's just that the realization took a while.

I really am excited about my new job! I'm delving into the terrible, horrible, worst-two-years-of-everyone's-life... middle school. Sound's fun! Right?! I have yet to encounter someone, who, when told I was going to be teaching middle school, hasn't said, "Oh! Middle Schooler's are awful! They're so mean all the time. I hated middle school!" Well geeze people, thanks for the boost of encouragement.

But seriously... I am excited about teaching middle school, despite what the general public has to say about they're horrible years in middle school.

I'm really blessed to have this job. It took one determined principal to get me hired. See... I'm not actually endorsed to teaching middle school math. I'm endorsed to teach middle school science and K-6 but not 7-8 math. The principal had to convince central office that I was worth the hassle and that come October I would have added the endorsement.

It does mean I have to take the middle school praxis exam in September. I've been using the last of my summer break to study up on some content that is on the exam. You might be thinking: She has to study for middle school math?! And they're letting her teach it?!

BUT: Before you start getting your knickers in a knot about my future student's lack of instruction, how many of you would remember what a multiplicative inverse was? Or the commutative property of addition? Or even how to find the distance between two points on a graph?

Probably not very many! But if you read that the multiplicative inverse was the number you multiplied to a number to make it equal one (aka... 354 and 1/354) you might remember it. And the commutative property just says A times B is the same as B times A. Not too complicated. The distance formula just requires making the two points into vertexes on a triangle and the using the Pythagorean Theorem to calculate the hypotenuse. Okay, that one sounds more complicated, but it really isn't!

All that to be said, middle school math does takes some reviewing. I am confidant that I will be fine both in teaching math and in taking my test.

I'm off to make some STELLAR mac n' cheese for my boyfriend who had a hard day at work.

Until then, remember: