karma's a... well you know

It has been brought to my attention that it has been three weeks since my last post, which should give you some indication that my life is pretty boring. however, lucky for you, just this morning I had quite the "My Name is Earle" moment, minus the dumb redneck best friend and ex-wife.

To catch you up- my fall term classes started about three weeks ago (also co-inciding with the drop-off in blog posts). I am taking 3 classes but am carrying a full 12 credit hours because along with my classes, I have to do a 75 hour clinical in a public high school. For this clinical, I am assigned to a specific teacher in a specific high school and must observe her teaching and teach a few lessons myself. This assignment was supposed to be posted on the Converse website the first week of classes so that we could get started as soon as possible. Of course, my assignment was not posted and only after weeks of being what my mom calls "being the squeeky wheel" (basicly annoying the tar out of the professor responsible for making my assingment and complaining loudly to anyone else who would listen), I was given my clinical placement today.

And this is where karma comes in. I was assigned to my Old 11th grade English Teacher at my alma mater- Go Pats! My Old 11th grade English Teacher did not exactly claim me as her favorite pupil. Every student in the school knows that she favors boys over girls and since I had the good fortune of sitting next to a particularly cute yet chatty boy, I was constantly called down for talking during class. There is also the matter of the research paper I wrote for her class in which I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Shoeless Joe Jackson did not throw the 1919 World Series and should in fact be reinstated in baseball and his name should hang in The Hall of Fame. It was the first real research paper I ever wrote and I have never been more proud of a paper since. Well, Ms. Old 11th Grade English Teacher stole my paper! I have yet to see it again since I turned it in over 10 years ago(yikes! i'm old!). I asked for it repeatedly my Senior year when I found that she had given my classmates papers back to them- but my paper was inexplicably not returned. My theory on this scandal is that she used my paper as the basis for her doctoral thesis when she went for her Ph.D. a few years after I graduated! All this to say, I have spent many years remembering Old 11th grade English Teacher in not the most kind ways, laughing at her obvious bias against girls, and always sympathizing with students in her classes.

So now, fittingly, I will be spending 75 hours in her classroom, watching her teach and trying to learn how to become the very best high school English teacher I can be! It's funny how things turn out isn't it?