The Beggining

I know that no one will probably ever read these crazy ramblings that I post.  But I need to be able to get some of these thoughts out of my head so that I do not completely drive my husband nuts!  If you would have told me 10 years ago that not only was I not a teacher, but never did do my education classes because of a law passed called No Child Left Behind, I would have laughed at you.  That was the only thing I wanted to do, ever...  
It all started when I left St. Anthony for Helena, MT and Carroll College.  Yes, a Mormon kid went to a Catholic school, and loved it.  I was in my first education class and had to do 40 hours of classroom observation.  I did my classroom observations in a middle school English class and fell in love with the "slow" kids.  These were the ones I understood the most.  They were not handicapped, they just didn't grasp things the way other students did.  Most of them were very bright, but they had been shuffled into a group that was treated like they were so different they could never learn.  My first lesson here is do not just lump all of the different kids together, it doesn't work very well.  My second lesson was that I enjoy the screwed up kids, the normal ones are the scary ones.  
Towards the end of my first semester there was a new piece of legislation that came out.  It was supposed to revolutionize education as we knew it.  Raise everyone to the same level they said.  The problem with this is that no one was on the same level to begin with.  In essence this meant that the more advanced students were left in the wind because the average student was holding the entire class up and the mediocre student made the class's progress skid to a screaming halt.  This was not fair to any of the students or to their teachers, who now must teach to the test instead of teach to the child.  I personally believe that standardized testing is dumbing down America and the next generation.  Multiple guess does not work, it promotes laziness on the part of administrators and makes teaching even more difficult than it already is.
After I transferred away from Carroll for a more economical option of BYU-Idaho I had to completely rethink my goals for life.  Here I was at another private school and I was a Special Education Major.  At BYU-Idaho this equates to early child hood education.  NO I DO NOT WANT TO TEACH PRESCHOOL!  I wanted to work with learning disabled kids, preferable in the Jr. High to High School level.  I did not want to run a daycare out of my house, or have to change the diapers of other people's children.  So with all of this in mind I dropped the education part of my major.  
Now with my history degree in hand I realize that I have a useless degree.  There are no jobs in Idaho for someone who has a history degree, and after a break away from school I have also come to the realization that I don't want to go back for grad school.  I took the GRE and the LSATs and want nothing to do with grad school, it is not worth my sanity to have another piece of paper saying I am smart.  Because of this decision I am working at random jobs and in fields that I never would have considered.  I have worked in everything from food service to administrative positions.  Currently I manage two, yes two, low income housing complexes.  So much for going to school and spending all of that money to get me to my dream job as I had been promised all of these years.  I can say that I was in the top 10 for a Library Director position, but alas I was not old enough to really be considered.  Go figure, I have a degree in one of the areas they wanted and because I was only 26 at the time I was too young.  Frustrating really if you look at it.  But then again I have decided that everything I learned in my pre-college education was fairly useless as well.  I don't use my algebra, geometry, physics, mad sentence diagramming skills, or my band skills at all in my everyday life.  But that is all for now, check back often for more ramblings on all sorts of topics.