James and Kristin Whitt’s Corner

Fighting back the forest

Work on the house has been going on even though we have not been posting it lately.  I’ve been mostly working on the outside of the house.  There were a LOT of trees everywhere around the house.  The entire backyard was complete covered with trees.  I’ve been cutting down all the trees and chipping them up.  I’ve also removed the flower circle thing in the front yard and chopped down all the weird plants in it.  Still have a whiel to go before I’m able to get it all done.

Praxis III

I just thought I’d share a little exciting news about my career.  Every beginning teacher now has to go through Praxis III their first year teaching.  Last year I didn’t do it because I wasn’t a classroom teacher.  So this year I had to do it since you only have your first two years to get it finished (without a lot of extra hassle).  What is it?  Well, it consists of meeting throughout the year with a mentor teacher (mine was awesome!!) and having a state assessor come in and assess everything single tiny detail about how you teach and handle a classroom full of kids … all in about three hours.  My Praxis III was on March 1 and my assessor watched me teach a math lesson about probability and we had a pre and post interview for me to explain why I taught what I did and how I did it.  I was very stressed in the weeks leading up to it because I have a very very very very very challenging class full of talkers, but when it came cruch time and the assessor was there everthing went pretty much perfectly.  I finally got my results back this past Monday and I passed!!!!!  That means that when I have to renew my license this June, I can get my five year and I’ll be good for five more years.

Carpet Upstairs

Well we finally have gotten everything painted and done upstairs so yesterday we went to Dalton Georgia Carpet and picked out the carpet for the rest of the upstairs.  They were able to come today to install it and are working on it now.  So by the end of today we’ll have the upstairs almost completely finished.  We have a few places that need tiny touchups on paint and the mirrored closet doors will need to be put back up, but we’re almost done!  After the carpet is all in, I’m going to start moving our stuff up from the basement and try to put it away and organize it for the rest of the week while I’m on Spring Break.

My dad is working on putting a new mailbox up for us today and then he’s going to start working on the hallway that goes downstairs.