garden of eden

In twenty minutes, I'm signing on to an interview prep webinar for the alternative teaching certification program I'm pursuing. Hopefully it'll give me good things to work towards ahead of my interview next week.

I keep reading up on what program alumni say its major cons are. Luckily all of them so far seem to be the obvious pitfalls of getting your certification in one summer instead of over a few years of university and student teaching. I badly want to get a proper degree long-term, but, well, I can't afford to take on more student debt at present, and with my fiance's job on the rocks due to his bosses' ongoing divorce, we could really use a second, more stable salary in this household. I hope that my previous experiences will help with the lesson planning side, and the more substitute teaching I do, the more practice I'll get with classroom management. If I actually get in to the program, I'll have a mentor during my first few years. That ought to help.

In the meantime, I'm reading a lot of library books about classroom management and related disciplines. If anyone has any beloved parenting or teaching books with useful perspectives on establishing routines and setting meaningful consequences, I'd appreciate recs!

What did this week need more of? Who said, "Giant messes that aren't your fault that no one else is going to clean up?"

Scene: the height of medium-city rush hour. We live at a fairly busy intersection just off the highway, so cars are whizzing by. A truck pulls up to pick up the recycling for the first time since the big ice storm at the end of January. Three or four weeks' worth of accumulated recycling.

Suddenly we hear an enormous crash, punctuated by the distinctive sound of breaking glass.

Near as I could tell from my peek out the window, something went wrong with the mechanical arm that lifts the cans up to be dumped into the truck. Our can was stuck halfway up for a bit, and the poor driver had to trigger some kind of manual release to get it out. He scooped up 75% of the fallen debris by hand, then moved on down the street, where a similar issue happened with our neighbor's can. Luckily, the driver was able to release it before more than a few pieces of cardboard spilled out. At that point, he seemed to give up on finishing out the rest of the route, and I can't blame him. Rush hour traffic was making everything about the scenario worse. The truck sped off, leaving our recycling cans and a massive heap of trash in the middle of the street.

During the ice storm, my fiance got really into collage. For the last few weeks, he's been bringing home all kinds of bits and pieces from work and generating lots and lots of teeny tiny paper scraps. Those scraps were all over the street now, mixed in with flattened soda cans and jagged bits of broken glass. We threw on pants and went out with a broom and dustpan to make the situation slightly less miserable.

The road in front of our house still looks like Oscar the Grouch threw a temper tantrum, but at least the glass, metal, and plastic is swept up. We got as much of the paper as we could, and I'm telling myself it's better than nothing. Sobbing, wailing, shrieking, etc.

At least our roommate is picking up pizza for dinner, so I don't have to think about cooking when I get out of my webinar.