End of Year 1

As of last Friday I have completed my first year as a high school Spanish teacher. While the last month was a bit hectic, it was still nothing compared to TV News.

I am currently exhausted and enjoying sleeping in and reading a lot. JBP is impatient to begin our summer sojourns to... the pool, the library, the science museum, the zoo, the park, etc. But bearing with his lazy mother.

I have 12 weeks off, supposedly. Three of those weeks will be partially consumed by classes I must take to begin working on certification. Two more are taken up with family trips to Iowa and Colorado. But there's still plenty of time for lazing around in between.

Unfortunately, my joy at the end of the first year has been taken away by a tragic accident. If I had posted my end-of-the-year post in a slightly more timely fashion this would've been a separate post. But I didn't and it isn't.

A head-on collision killed one of my students on Memorial Day in a head-on collision. He was in my Spring Spanish II class and my homeroom all year. His girlfriend, who was driving, remains in serious condition at this time. Her five-year-old brother, who was in the car with them, died Tuesday morning from injuries suffered in the accident.

These are the types of stories I left TV News over. I was tired of covering all the tragedies and horrors of our world. Now I'm living it from the other side of the camera.

To top it all off, I have electronic versions of the kids' yearbook pictures. I wanted to pass them on to my colleagues at my old TV station, so they wouldn't have to bother the kids' families trying to get them. My new boss wouldn't ok this (the pictures officially belong to the school, not me) because he wanted to "protect" the family, even though the news crews would indubitably get the pictures from someone else in town.

I walked away from the whole thing rather than try to argue my side (the families would've not been bothered at all yesterday, if we'd just provided the pictures to the news media) because I was afraid I'd completely lose my temper. I'm still simmering over it.

Nimitz' Lady