gee whiz

Man, it's hard to find time to post (or look at other people's blogs) these days...student teaching is amazingly time consuming. I am looking forward to the day that I get PAID to be exhausted by teaching all day, grading/planning all afternoon, crashing into my bed as early as possible, still dragging out of bed the next morning at least 30 min. after my alarm has started ringing...
Most days I like it...a few I really hate it...
I realized today though, after teaching oxidation numbers all day long, that maybe the best aspect of student teaching in an IPC (integrated physics and chemistry) class is that not only am I learning how to teach and how to manage a classroom, but even more exciting, I am understanding for the first time ever in my life the chemistry that I have to teach. For example, never before have I understood in the slightest exactly what oxidation numbers were, how they were assigned, or what the point of knowing them would be...after teaching them today, I now know how they were assigned and why one would want to know them...and that is EXCITING for nerds like me : ).
On a weird note, I feel kind of sad and out of the loop in pretty much every friend circle I have...because I don't see many people outside of church on sunday morning and challenge on sunday night...true, I don't have much time to do anything and absolutely NO money...and I'm a terrible caller although I have been working on that most of my life (no, really)...but still, since I'm not on campus I don't see any bio friends, since I'm not at work I don't see my work buddies, since I'm not a challenge leader I'm way out of the loop in the church cliques...sad, I miss people mucho. I don't mean to sound pitiful...or even disgruntled by the "church cliques" comment - I have yet to go to a church that lacks cliques...and I have stuck with First B throughout college partly because of the people - all I mean is that I'm out of the loop and it's sad because I'll be leaving in Dec.
Ay, enough rambling already! Back to grading lab reports (ugh, sick, I hate them, no, I loathe them)...

whew

So it's been a long time since I've posted...sorry about that to anyone who might read this. I will get those Africa stats up sometime soon (but not today, I forgot to bring them with me). The exciting news about Africa is that I just received an email yesterday with flight information for me - Mar. 1 I fly to Chicago, London, Nairobi Kenya and Mar. 30 I fly home! So now comes the tough part - finding funds. It's amazing that it is so difficult to ask others for money...I guess probably because it takes a lot of humbling. As someone who generally likes to be pretty independent, I hate to write those letters asking for help! I am going to have to be dependent on God's provision of money for this adventure though and that means humbling myself enough to ask others! Besides that, anyone who might want to fund my trip and everyone who prays for my trip is actually taking part in the trip which is really cool. I guess the point of fellowship with other believers is that we stick together, help each other out, walk through life in support of each other... and that's pretty great!
On another note, the reason I have been posting so few and far between is that student teaching has gotten to the c-razy point! I have started the "full teach" part of the semester which means I plan, teach all day, design all lesson plans, grade all papers, etc. etc. and it is absolutely amazing how exhausted I am every day! I like it most of the time, like it a lot in fact, but still, this is really tough. On Saturday I took my 2 tests to become certified and I am praying that I passed! The science test (over chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy, meteorology, cell biology, genetics, ecology, and science teaching methods) was REALLY HARD!!! and the teacher test was just weird... wow, I hope I passed, I do not want to do that again! All together almost 5 hours of testing, 220 questions (130 of which were science). I guess that's really just a warm-up for the GRE that I'll be taking in the spring sometime, but still, ay ay ay! Ha, at least it's over...