My First Day of School

School started today, and it was pretty fun. I'm teaching French 1 & 2 to 8th and 9th graders at Joel P. Jensen Middle School in West Jordan. I teach three French classes, and one advisory period on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (It's just 20 minutes of reading, helping students with their grades, and playing learning games). My biggest class has 34 students, and my smallest class has around 23 students. I know this was just my first day, and I know I'll have days when I won't feel this way, but I really love teaching! And doing this just part-time, I think, will be so nice! I only have to be there till 11:20ish. Anyway, as promised, here are a few pictures of my classroom.

I just got some more posters and stuff in the mail today, so more will be going up soon. One thing I don't like about my room, however, is that there are no windows. And it's hot. Oh, and one more: I have to use a Mac instead of a PC (sorry to all you Mac users, but I just don't like them!). I guess that's three things I don't like about my room. Oh well.

Anyway, so that's my classroom. I'm sure I'll have some fun junior high student stories to tell shortly!

In Memory of Franklin

As the title of this blog implies, our poor bird Franklin died sometime last night. We don't have any idea what could have caused his death. He seemed to be healthy and happy, but then again, I don't know too much about bird health. I was never too excited about having a pet bird, but Franklin in the short 2 1/2 weeks that we had him had started to grow on me. Every morning when Sam would wake up, we would go say hello to the bird. Sam loved Franklin (except when Franklin first discovered his voice and it scared Sam). Sam would waddle into the room and point at the bird cage with a huge grin. Last night I went in to look at him and he was looking so cute asleep on his little bar (no, he wasn't dead at that point--just sleeping). I was getting almost brave enough to overcome my phobia of birds and actually hold him, but in the end I never did. I'm actually very surprised at how sad I am at his death. In the words of a neighbor-boy, he was a good bird.

Announcing a new addition to the family

We were deciding on going out to eat between two places: Royal India (I love love love their spinach thing I always get) or Paradise Bakery (to which we had a gift card). If money weren't an issue, I would have chosen the former, but I figured that we should probably save our money and go to the bakery instead. The food was alright; I really don't like their soups too much, however, I do love their quiche.

After dinner, we decided to go check out Petco thinking that Sam might enjoy looking at the animals there. So we wondered around for awhile looking at the fish and the reptiles. We hoped their would be puppies, but there weren't any. Then we came to the birds. I don't mind them in cages, but I have this strange fear of them when the fly around; you never know where they're going to land. Anyway, the parakeets were surprisingly cheap, and I made the mistake of saying that I wouldn't mind a bird at that price. Chris got excited and somehow talked me into buying one. He said that Sam needed a pet, and parakeets are pretty easy to take care of.

So we have a new member of the Taylor family. His name is Franklin, and he is really pretty. It was a little scary transferring him from his box to his new cage. I think I scared Sam pretty well with all my screams and jerking around trying to run away from the little guy. Hopefully we'll all get used to each other and I'll get over my strange fear.

So after a free meal, a bird, a birdcage, food, and all the rest, I think it would have been cheaper in the end had we gone to Royal India for dinner.