Obama Back to School Speech

I personally am not a fan of Obama's politics, but after doing a quick reading of his planned speech for tomorrow, I am pleasantly surprised. I will not be showing the speech in my classroom on the first day because of scheduling conflicts, but I do believe that it is mostly a good message.


First off, let me say that I DO NOT believe in using the classroom to push political agenda. I try very hard as an educator to be an unbiased as possible in presenting material to my students. They are at a young and impressionable age and it is not my job or the government's job to push political ideas on them. I witnessed some interesting political conversation among my students this last school year that makes it obvious to me that they pick up a lot of ideas from their parents.

I'm sure that people can read into the speech and find faults, but my first reading found it to be a good message. I personally think that it is a little long for the elementary school level and my fourth graders probably wouldn't pay attention to the whole thing. Basically what I got from it is that you need to work hard in school. Kids see Obama as a movie star because he's on TV so much. I have seen it in my own classroom, so I hope he does inspire some kids to work a little harder. I appreciated this one part of his speech particularly because I am a "no excuses" kind of girl.

"But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying. "

Personally as an educator of young children, I would've had him take this next part out because kids don't really care what he's given speeches about. They'll have a hard enough time listening to the whole speech. I think this is where they would phase out.

"Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve."

Yada, yada, yada. Blah, blah, blah..

I know that this has turned into quite the issue even causing my school district to release this statement. Obama isn't the first president to come up with the idea of addressing school children. The first George Bush did it in 1991 and received the same type of criticism from Democrats. I don't believe it's a terrible thing as a president to talk to schoolchildren as long as there isn't a hidden political agenda.

Here is a link to the speech if you are interested in reading the whole thing.

Gift Card Date (Yes, ANOTHER one!)

As a teacher, I am very lucky to have the classroom parents I do. They usually like to get me gift cards as thank you's during the school year. Today, Doug and I got to have another gift card date before the school year starts. I blogged about my last gift card date here.

We started the morning at a fancy pants place in Ashburn called the Amenity Day Spa. Let me start this off by saying that Doug and I are NOT fancy people... The people there were like sipping champagne and talking about rich people stuff. It cost $65 per person for a 30 minute massage! (but I was using a gift card so I guess it didn't matter) We came in and they started us in the "relaxation room" with a drink of our choice and tons of forms with weird questions to fill out. The lady took us on a mini tour and showed us the changing rooms where we were given robes and fancy slippers to change into.

When we came back to the relaxation room to wait for the masseuses, Doug announced to me that he felt ridiculous and uncomfortable in the robe. :) They gave us our massages in the same room. Doug had a female masseuse and I had a male one which I thought it was weird that they didn't do it the opposite way, but we both enjoyed the massages. It was a 30 minute deep tissue massage which actually hurt a bit, but afterward it felt really good. The whole robe thing was a little uncomfortable, but I guess I could get used to it if I had $150 bucks to blow when I wanted a massage.

As we were leaving I told Doug, "He massaged my butt!" He just laughed at me and let me know that they do that. It was quite the surprise to me! I kind of wished that he would've warned me going in.

After the spa we went to the Dulles Town Center where I was finally able to get the Aeropostale people to remove the ink tags off the jeans I bought there almost 2 weeks ago. Not a store that I usually shop at, but they had a buy one get one free sale a little while ago and I had a coupon on top of that. I had to dig through all of the size ZEROS to find a 10 that fit me. Size 0, who wears that? When I joked with the cashier about all of the size zeros, he informed me that their usual clientele are younger (and smaller too, I guess.)

I hate that there are certain stores for certain types of people and you don't know it until you go in and a salesperson intercepts you and kindly "hints" to you that this ISN'T the store for you. (I tend to get reminders like this frequently.)

Anyways, we also got to stop by Borders for me to trade a duplicate book that I accidentally bought. We found this great Calvin & Hobbes Sunday Edition book for Doug that actually has the rough sketches next to the final ones which is pretty cool. Last time I was there and asked for my teacher discount the lady flat out asked me how old I was. When I showed her my badge, she told me that she thought I was 15. Yeah, I may be younger, but 15??


On the way out, we stopped by a Kirtland store and actually bought a painting to go in the breakfast nook of the kitchen. This is quite the big accomplishment for me because I am such an indecisive person. They had a HUGE sale going on and there was a picture that I really liked a while ago, but passed up on because of the price. We got it for $20! (and on gift cards too!) It should go with the Americana kitchen theme that I hope to do, but haven't actually bought anything for yet.


We then headed over to Red Lobster where Doug got the Neverending Shrimp Platter and I got some Lobster Pizza. We love the cheesy biscuits there! I have to recommend the lobster pizza. I don't really like seafood all that much, but Doug loves it, so we try to go a fish place every once in a while. The lobster pizza was only an appetizer which made it cheap, it was big, and sooo good!


What a fun day! Doug said that one thing that he'll miss once I stop teaching (besides the paycheck) is the fun gift card dates that we get to go. Sorry for the long blog post. I was so excited about our day.. our usual Saturdays consist of going to my parents house to hang out all day and watch TV.

Mister & Mrs. Tang

...is what Doug and I go by in the WAMAS group, a group for saltwater aquarium enthusiasts in the DC Area.

Doug started up a saltwater aquarium about a year ago. Saltwater aquariums take a lot of work and unfortunately Doug has not been able to do a lot of the upkeep because he is not living at home right now. For the last few months, I have been taking care of the tank and am proud to say that I haven't killed anything... that PBJ coral was on it's way out already.

Anyways, the tank is pretty dang awesome and I realized that I haven't actually put any pictures of it on my blog. So, here are some pictures of our tank. It's not just Doug's anymore. I now feel a little bit more ownership now that I'm the one taking care of it.

I hadn't looked through the pictures that we took all the way from the beginning. It's pretty crazy how far our tank has come!

This is the tank when we first got it and put in live rock.

A couple months later with our first corals.

This is basically what the tank looks like today.

This is Mele Mele, our yellow tang. He is Doug's inspiration for starting a saltwater tank.

This is one of our two tiger-banded sea stars. They only come out at night, but they're pretty cool.

This is Manie, the Mandarin. It's hard to take a picture of him because he flutters 

around like a hummingbird. This is one of the hardest fish to keep and we haven't killed it yet!

This is a picture of one of our two frogspawn corals.

FYI Dental Insurance

I blogged a while ago about worries that I had with dental costs here. I've now completed "My Treatment Plan" which included 2 crowns and 3 fillings. Yuck!

I had already paid $800 for my treatment and my plan covers 80% of the stuff I was getting done, so according to some calculations I did it looked like I might actually get a little money back. Last week, I received a $1,300 bill from my dentist. Yeah, I was surprised too.

I started by calling my dentist who let me know that the claim for one of my crowns had been denied. Denied? Um, how can your insurance deny something that they say that they cover?

I learned a bit more about the insurance process today while I was on the phone and I can now answer that question. So if you go or will ever go to the dentist, this might be some helpful information. I know it all seems very basic, but I really did think that my insurance would cover the procedures that it listed on my policy. Silly me!

Each time a dentist submits a claim they need to attach x-rays and such showing why they needed to do 'X' treatment. The insurance company then has their consultants look over this information and decide whether or not the procedure was indeed "necessary" before they will cover it. If the consultant deems it UNnecessary, then the patient (me in this case) will need to pay the full cost of the treatment.

This all sounds VERY reasonable and I understand why they need to go through this process because dental insurance companies don't want to pad the pockets of dentists that are doing unnecessary procedures. When I talked to my insurance company on the phone, they told me that it was good practice to have any procedure over $250 pre-approved with them before actually getting it done. Once again, excellent information, but 4 months too late.

Now what do I do? Well, the insurance company told me that I need to have my dentist office file an appeal explaining why my treatment was indeed necessary. You can file up to two appeals. If the appeal is granted then the insurance will cover it. If not... well I guess I will have a big unexpected bill coming up.

So hopefully this will be a positive learning experience and my claim will be covered. What can you learn from this and why am I sharing? Make sure that you get any procedure pre-approved EVEN if your policy says that it is covered.

Lesson learned.

Squircle

The town that I live in was planned by a bunch of nincompoops who really like stop signs and wasting time. In the very center of town, we have what the townspeople “affectionately” call the squircle. The squircle is a big intersection thingy that functions like a round-a-bout, but its a... square. This last week, Doug’s grandma was dropping off the girls at the house and was unable to get to our place because of this confusing squircle. I remember the first few times we drove through it to come watch the house being built and I had no clue where we were going. I’m just now starting to understand how it works and we’ve lived in our house now for well over a year and I drive through it every day.

Anyways, this squircle has really been annoying me lately. I’m taking a slightly different route to school in the morning that takes me the annoying way through the squircle. I took a screen shot of the squircle in Google Maps and showed the route that I have been taking. Taking this route involves going through 3 stop signs in under a minute and you only end up about 100 feet front where you started.


I know this is a lame post, but I using up all of my brain power to set up my classroom. Unfortunately I lost the motivation today to actually get any real work done, so now I'm blogging.

Word Verification

I was feeling daring and took word verification off of my blog a couple months ago because I thought it was a pain. For those of you that forget what word verification is it that little thing that has you type in the weird letters to verify if you're human and not a computer when you leave comments. I haven't gotten any "comment spam", but I don't have much traffic either.

You should do it too... well unless you like verifying that you're human.

Five Below

For Activity Day Girls this last week I planned some fun with water balloons. I ended up going to FOUR different stores to try to find water balloons with NO LUCK. I started to get a little panicked because the activity was on Tuesday and it was Monday and I was running out of time.

I posted on my Facebook status update that I was looking for water balloons and was informed by Doug's Aunt Rachel that she just saw some at Five Below. I had never been to a Five Below so I Googled for locations and found one a few miles away from the school. I dropped by on Tuesday and the water balloons were in one of the front bins on display!

While I was in the store, I decided to walk around a little and check out what else they had in the store. BIG MISTAKE... they had a section with books! I spent some money, but I picked up twelve great books (some of them hardbound!) for under $40. Eleven of them are for my classroom and one of them is for Doug. I found this really neat book called Spies and Espionage: a Directory. I hope he likes it! He loved the movie Breach and we were just randomly talking about spies this weekend.

All of these books for under $40!

These non-fiction books have great pictures and good info for curious kids.

Kids love books with disgusting or amazing things in them.

Doesn't this look like a cool book?

If you are near a Five Below... stop by and pick up a non-fiction book for your child's elementary school teacher as a Back to School present. I guarantee you that she/he doesn't have enough non-fiction books!

"What a Little A-Hole!"

We went by my parents' house while Doug's siblings were visiting this last weekend. Allie was looking for a craft to do while we were in the process of making Katie addicted to Guitar Hero. Allie made this cute little race car out of a foam kit that my mom had sitting around. It came complete with a little pennant that they could put their name and a lucky number on. She did it with a little bit of help on my part, but it turned out great!

While we were at the zoo the next day, Allie accidentally left her little craft on the table. When we came back, Darwin had ripped her little pennant to shreds, but luckily left the car alone. I was having a bit of a flashback to when Darwin chewed my shoes, so I really could relate with Allie. She was really sad, but then she decided that she would "give" the pennant to Darwin since he was having so much fun with it.

We were kind of upset at Darwin until he started walking away with his tail sticking up and there was the A from Allie's name stuck to his butt.

Doug exclaimed, "What a little A hole!" :)