"Screw you guys! I hate high school!"

Hi, my name is Gretchen, I'm 26 and I decided to do this blog because I've never done anything like this before.  Truthfully, I may not be tech-savvy enough to pull this off, but we all need challenges, right? So, I'm jumping in and how big a splash I make is anyone's guess.  So, here goes.

The title of my blog comes from my job.  I teach 6-12 Spanish at a very small school and our mascot is The Vikings.  Being a foreign language teacher, like any job, has its challeges, but I often feel the biggest is expanding students’ experience beyond small-town Iowa.  I know teenagers are self-invovled all over and as important as verb conjugations and vocabulary are, if I can get a student to acknowledge that views and opinions, which differ from their own, are also worth exploring, it’s a good say.  When I have students that won’t even try to look past their own noses I feel as out of place and as strange as a viking who speaks Spanish. 

Now, the title of my post comes from a movie, “She’s the Man.” It stars Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum.  It’s a modern take on Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”  I chose it because as difficult as balancing classes and swimming and band and friends was when I was a student, the classes and teacher meetings and coaching and administration and teaching students is that much more daunting now.  I sometimes wonder how, when choosing to be a teacher, I skipped over the fact that I’d be going to high school for way longer than the mandatory 4 yrs most others endure.  After four years, I’m considering graduating on to something else.  What that might be I can’t be sure.  Hopefully, as the month progresses this blog can be a distraction to give me time away from my own life so I don't fall into the same isolation and lack of perspective my own students sometimes demonstrate.