Teacher, teacher

I was surprised to see how long it had been since I'd posted. I guess I've been busy. Where do I start?

It appears that I won't be able to do the One Year Practicum program to get my teacher certification. The school budget won't allow it. My other option at this point, should I wish to become a teacher, is to take one more GACE test and enroll in a teacher certification program. I will then be qualified to begin teaching as long as I can get my teacher certification done in five years.

So I am now seriously considering the possibility of getting a Masters in Education. It means only a few more classes after getting certification. I am looking into the many programs that are available to me and trying to talk to as many people as possible. Those of you who pray, would you please pray that I talk to the right people and ask the right questions. It's a very interesting, exciting and overwhelming time in my life.

On the home front, Kathleen got on the track team at her school. She is the first of the kids to participate in any school sport. I'm enjoying it immensely. She has two hours of practice pretty much every school day, unless she competes in a track meet. The weekly track meet runs all the way until 7:00 pm after school, and I can get in free with my substitute teacher badge. She is certainly not the fastest kid out there, but she runs hard and tries hard. I'm very proud of her.

Keri Lynn and I have been filling out the endless forms and jumping through the endless hoops for college. She wants to go to either Shorter College, which is one of three Southern Baptist colleges in Georgia, or Georgia State and College University, a liberal arts college with a strong Christian contingency. It's an interesting, exciting and overwhelming time in her life, too!

I continue to sub at the same middle school, where I've been since December. For those of you who might not remember from previous posts, I work in a self-contained special ed. class as a teacher's assistant. ("Self-contained" means that the kids stay in their own classroom rather than assimilate into general ed.) Half of the kids are in wheelchairs and all of them are at the lower end of the IQ range. Keva is at another middle school and would fit right in with these kids. I have had the privilege of teaching each one, to a certain extent, and watching them react to the learning process. I especially enjoy giving the readers their reading lessons. The brain is an amazing creation!

In fact, I've been enjoying it so much that I am seriously considering going into special education as a teacher at the severe/profound level. I was asked several times last year by several people if I would like to teach a self-contained class. My answer was, "No, thank you." Inside I was saying, "Are you CRAZY?!? Don't you know I already take care of a daughter at that level? And you want me to do it 24 hours a day!?!" And the person asking would nod and agree in complete understanding. However, now I have a different perspective, and the opportunities are still there even in our current tough economy.

Keith is going to be going to California sometime in the next few days to try to get the long versions of Keri Lynn and Kristofer's birth certificates. Apparently, when we got their birth certificates, three of our seven kids got the abstract version of the birth certificate. It says right on their "official government document", but it does not have the city in which they were born. It has worked fine for us all these years and would be fine if we were applying for passports in California, but doesn't work in Georgia. Argh! So we have about 30 more days to get this issue taken care of. Thank God for Keith's flight privileges. It would take way too long to get it fixed by mail. I shudder to think!