First Pay Check in Over 4 Years!

Oh, it feels so good to be back in the workforce, particularly when $ is sorely needed in the family budget (not that we have a proper budget, mind you :-) ! I guess that feeling useless in the monetary department was part of the reason I felt so depressed at times over the summer. I do feel much more optimistic about life now and in a month I will have another paycheck from the online job. It's not much, but it's something.

Now, as for the previous post, in the end I didn't even finish my main idea, which was that teaching K-2 has been an enormously enriching cultural experience for me. It's giving me an inside view of how children learn to read, write, and basic math in this country and I'm happy with what I see. I particularly like the way math is taught (this is the publisher of the book we use, looking at their website I just found out they have a new math series and I wish the school could get that one, of course!)... I love it how the same things are taught gradually in more and more complex ways both within each grade and from one grade to the next (i.e. the 1st and 2nd grade books follow the same pattern, just increasing in complexity).

Of course I don't have recent experience (luckily, my SIL does, she taught 2nd grade and was a school counselor until 7 years ago), but I know that math is taught very differently in Brazil. It's much more intense (like children learning their first multiplication tables in first to second grade), but it doesn't teach the students to think as much. I love it how here they learn algebra (the reasoning behind it) from the very beginning.

Well, anyway... I do have some bad news too, associated with the previous post. As it turns out, the school cannot pay me the rate they had previously promised (although in the first pay check they did, of course), it'll be 1.50 less/h. Moreover, they can only afford to have me be working there three days a week, which further reduces my income, so I may be looking into adjuncting for the Spring... wish me luck! I'm ok with this, though, because it will be easier to juggle work and home with Thursday and Fridays at home (I have to say that my mom was extremely relieved to hear that because she was worried about us coping with my full time work). It will be good for Linton too, I can take him to the park, or elsewhere, and he can play as he pleases at home. So, it's all good.