Updates about life

Oh yeah..  new job..  since May.

Working on writing lesson plans for writing classes.  (Funny since I think I completely suck at writing, but here I am learning as I go.)  I really have learned a lot.  I'm currently editing first and second grade lesson plans, but I'm learning about narrative, persuasive, and informative writing.  I'm even learning how to structure paragraphs.  It's really amazing how all of this is new to me, and yet elementary schoolers are learning it.  I've consistently failed at nearly all of my English classes since I entered high school.  I realized that it's because I've never really learned how to write.  I remember my 8th grade English class.  I don't think I wrote a single essay in that class.  I'm pretty sure I started writing essays in 9th grade.  All of my knowledge on how to write was just from context, and now I'm actually learning the foundations of writing.  It's pretty neat.  All my years as a teacher has given me the skill to verbalize my thought process, and now I'm learning the correct structure of how to put that down on a page.  Yay.

I'm also working on a middle school math curriculum.  Yay!!  It's not official but I'm more or less in charge of it.  Pretty much everyone in the office has accepted it.  In fact in the first two weeks of launching the project we made so much progress on it that they had to pause it.  Mostly because there's a bigger priority (writing lessons).  But once all of the edits for the writing lessons are in, the math curriculum project is back on.

New motivational tool!!  It's called Habitica.  It's pretty much a to-do list, but slightly different.  You have an avatar you control (with pets!) and every time you complete something you gain experience and coins.  You can level up, join a party, go on quests, defeat monsters, etc.  It's a real-life rpg.  So awesome.  There's even a daily section, where you put things you want to finish daily.  Some of the things I include are flossing, praying, reading the Bible, exercising.  You can even change the difficulties so that some give you more experience and others give you less.  If you miss the daily for the day you take damage, and if you die...  well your character dies.  It's really motivating for me personally because I've always been into rpg's and now I'm an rpg character myself.  I'm on level 4.  Yay~