EducatingMe

In 2016 I did not set goals for myself. I felt like I wasn't up for setting some lofty version of my self to try to live up to. I wanted to relax last year and just focus on the work in front of me. I had no time for additional goals. Well, then life hit. I had back surgery in January. I was the right decision at the time. I feel so much better these days, but it did not come without loss. I was told I could no longer be a runner anymore. Or a mountain biker, that I was a walker now. I was a swimmer. For those of you that know me, that was a major hit to my hobbies.  In March I attended the most amazing Ed Conference I have ever been to. SXSWEdu is the conference Educators must try to get to at some point in their career. It opened my eyes to the new landscape education is cultivating. This conference showed me that the moving and shaking in education was not happening in administrators offices. It was happening in the classrooms. This was a huge hit to my psyche. I always ...

Up front I should tell you, I am a hot mess. I have all of these thoughts and feeling inside of my head that I cannot express without screaming or crying. I just found out some real Deliverance type $h!+ that happened in the family tree and I cannot make heads or tails of it. I will dramatize the names and relationships to protect those that wish to continue to remain blameless and clueless. Beth was an 8 yr old kid. Her father like any red blooded back woods freak had high aspirations of being a Grand Wizard for the KKK.  Beth being only a child with no mother at home (because the mother selfishly left the home leaving backwoods dad to raise 5 kids) loved her father. The father here, who selfishly loved to hate black people, decided that, to make it anywhere in this sick twisted world of his daughters had to be passed around to the other twisted sickos (that hated all non-white/christian persons) for fun little romp of sexual pleasuring for themselves. You might be asking at thi...

Hi, my name is Erin and I am a bully. Why the heck can I teach other peoples kids all day long and with the patience of Job, but when it comes to my own children's learning, I reduce myself to tactics that were used against me when I was a child? Those tactics made me angry, mad, sad, defeated, not smart enough. In the act of bullying that is not what I remember. When I am working through the math problems or reading activities and am met with questioning eyes and frustrated glances...all I can see is that some days she reads with ease and some days she is stubborn as hell and for got the sound the B makes. Some days her mental math capabilities are beyond the 1st grade expectations and other days I ask what comes after 46 and tears fill her eyes. My 4th grader can do this to me too...typically I bring both of them to tears once a month though on different days. All the while I am standing over them shouting that she remembered this yesterday. I did this today. I typically ke...

For those of you that haven't seen the iconic movie, Planes, Trains and Automobiles , I will give you the short version. Guy meets guy on a plane...connection flight is cancelled so the two travel across country together running into bad luck all along the way. While Anne and I knew each other (kinda) before adventuring on this modern day adventure, the same kind of bad luck kept creeping its head around every corner. We tried to document much of the chaos and fun on the Facebook page -  https://www.facebook.com/ErinandAnne/?fref=ts We arrived in Denver around 10:30 PM to the AirBNB we reserved weeks earlier. Upon arrival the host was heavily intoxicated and the details from the description on the website did NOT match the house. Long story short, we politely shook hands and told him we would just get a hotel for the night. Little did we know that Denver was sold out. Folks, I mean for real. After calling the list of hotels we Googled the the next two hours and arguing with ...

WARNING!!! I have no idea how many obscenities will be thrown around in this post. I am a good gal but came from a down-home-say-it-how-you-like-up-bringing... My good ol' buddy Tyler Bridges was so great to point out to me today some of the great pieces of legislation that came of of this session while I was so focused on the education bills. I cannot be in all subjects at all times, so thank you Tyler. Thanks for highlighting some of the real gems. Ok, what? What the hell is this horse hocks? Daggers? Sword canes? Who the hell is so worried about this and petitioning and lobbying about the need of this that it was necessary to pass this bill this year? I am kind of serious here. Please if you are one of these people step out. Let me in on what I am missing and why it is so imperative that 2016 was the year this needed amended? Let me tell you who is stoked about this newly amended law. My 9 year old daughter Tatum who does have a dagger. She is so into the FAIRY TAIL W...

I was in a conversation with a gal the other day and she was asking me questions about why Oklahoma is in such a bind when it comes to education. She went on to say she passes by several schools on her drive and they are adding on or building up the school. Her question was - how do we have money to build and not the money to pay teachers? I had to explain to her that unlike personal banking accounts where she can decide if she has a vacation fund or pay the bills fund or buying a new pair of shoes fund. In the financial world that the education system must live in, you cannot take from the vacation fund to pay your bills. If you have a vacation fund, you go on vacation and let the water and electric get shut off. You buy the shoes and let the house go to repo. She was pretty upset at that point. She (the lay-person) was not informed as to how the situation worked.   As a typical human being with typical senses (who may have also survived the single semester of persona...

This is really nothing more than a quick shout out to my new friend Josh Flores I absolutely love when worlds come together. In the past couple of years, I have kinda run in the same circle as the #OklaEd staple in Josh Danger Flores. For those of you that don't know him to well because maybe your circles haven't collided, he is a beer drinking, blog and podcasting sonofvagun with a love of coffee and education. We have tweeted back and forth and narrowly missed each other at conferences (actually, I did sit in for like 15 minutes of his Evernote presentation at Recharge in Clinton last summer). Today however, we sat down to get to know each other the only way two people really can...with microphones shoved in our faces for an actually listened to podcast. Joking aside, he was great. We shared the love of a few different things, namely professional development, coffee and teaching. I was at ease the whole time. Josh had a way of not letting it feel like we only knew e...