Starting Over

So, we had a miscarriage in September 2014 but have now been blessed with our rainbow baby.  It is now October 2015 and our baby girl is 10 weeks, and 14 pounds.  I can't tell you how many times in the last few months I have heard Awe is this your first baby?, when I respond no we have a 12 year old, people look at me surprised and say oh your starting over...  hence the title of this post.  :)

I am also starting over with the blogging.  Being that I have taken some extra time off work I have extra time to blog.  So my goal here is to be real.  No perfect family perfect pintrest, perfect body posts.  

The name of my blog is Coxy's life.  That's me.  my maiden name, which my husband and brother in law still refer to me as.  Red Pens, Binky's, and Barbells refer to teaching, mom-ing, and bodybuilding.  I hope to keep writing about the state of education, but also my life with a newborn and 12 year old, and my fitness journey while humoring and motivating others.  

I kinda forgot to think of a word to add to the title that refers to our farming.  but I will also share stories of our farm.  I call it a small farm right now it kinda grows and shrinks depending on how hungry the pesky fox is.  We mainly raise free range chickens.  We had a free range goat but that turned out to not be the best idea, more on that later, and a donkey.  I will introduce all of these guys in a later post...  Oh yeah and I almost forgot about the 9 cats that we now have too!!

Anyway baby is beginning to fuss so I'll talk to you guys soon!!  :)

~Coxy

Our system's focus

T.E.M 3.0 and T.E.M 4.0...  if you are a teacher you know how much has changed in last 9 years when it comes to evaluation.  When I first began teaching there was a bunch of paper work that went along with being evaluated but what it all boiled down to was a lesson plan, a reflection, and a plan to improve, it wasn't too bad.  Now Our system is focused on teaching and NOT learning and there is a difference!  In my district every year they are rolling out a new teacher evaluation rubric.  And this thing has 7 domains, each with 5 levels and each level has indicators that must be met.  If you are not at least a 3 in a vast majority of the domains you are in danger of losing your job.  These indicators say things like 'All students can explain or demonstrate lesson objectives'  'All students are challenged' 'All students are engaging in appropriately challenging work'  That all sounds good but what happened to administration being happy to have teachers who are up and teaching.  Who cares if students are in groups 'providing each other with feedback'  If you really think they are working when they are in those groups you are crazy...  If students are working well in those groups, I know from experience, it doesn't mean the teacher is a great teacher, it means she threatened them pretty good!  It shouldn't matter if I have CCSS on my board or an S.P.I.  as long as the students are being taught.   I shouldn't be knit picked because I forgot ask a student what our objective for the day was, or because I didn't relate the problems to the students interests...  TCAP nor CRA do that...  I teach in my math class not to get hung up on a word that you can't read or don't know and pay attention to the ones we do know, because that is what happens on the these tests, they use big words trying to confuse the students.  But anyway back to my point Teaching is an art, a science, just like an artist each teacher has their own style stop trying to make all of us like robots who do the same activities and say the same things!!  I understand that learning has to be tested but as long as students learned what they were supposed to learn it shouldn't matter how the teacher got them there!

Anyway just rambling again,
Moral of the story, goes back to the quote I read somewhere the other day, "Our system is focused on teaching not learning and there is a difference'