First Day of Teacher Workshops!!!

Back to school....after a much needed relaxing summer I am ready to get back into my school schedule. This will be my 5th year at North View Junior High School; a place that I have grown to love. This year brings a couple new changes for me. The biggest being I will be teaching four 9th grade physcial education classes and sharing a office space with Darci (you can see half of her in the pciture). This is my office....I have spent the last two days and a some hours last week getting my office set up and ready. I haven't taught phy ed classes for over seven years so I am looking forward to the new challenge and the new scenery!
This other picture is the way I am going to be spending the other two hours of my day...teaching 7th grade health class. The challenge of doing that this yeas is that my classroom moved to the sceince rooms and I will be sharing my space with another teacher. I guess that just gives me the chance to get to know other teachers- right! My passion has alwasy been teaching health class, so I am sure I will miss teaching all six classes of health! But my guess is that the day will not be boring and I will get my exercise running back and forth from the girls locker room to my science room. REGARDLESS of my set up of rooms I am ready to tackle the school year.

We had a motivational speaker talk to us on Monday morning and he had great things to say. He gave us three things to use during our days, months and year to keep our ATTITUDE positive. #1- to protect our ears...to really be careful at what we let ourselves hear and what we let pentatrate our mind. He gave us a saying to use whenver we feel like our attitude is starting to fade...."dont steal my joy"! He also gave us movement to do with it. I have already had to walk away from a teacher saying "dont steal my joy"....it might become my new favorite saying #2 - to protect our eyes...again, to be careful at what we let our eyes see. And to make sure that we are always seeing the positive in situations. #3 - to be careful what we say. and to say positive things more often; especially when we are proud of others...and for that matter proud of ourselves! The more positive things we say (to ourselves or to others) the better our atttidue will be. He was a great speaker and got us all fired up. Plus, after listening to him for about 5 minutes I knew he was a Christian...what a cool thing to have a Christain speaker speak 'truth" into over 1500 teachers...some of which I am sure aren't beleivers. I felt very blessed!