Only because you asked...

My sister-in-law, Amy, tagged me, and since I never usually respond to these I thought I would for once. I came up with this list today while I was substituting.


6 Non-Important things/habits/quirks about myself:

1. I love history, especially American history, and love teaching it in a way students want to learn it, and can realize how much it really does affect them. (Most people think of history as boring, date memorization and/or irrelevant to today.) The corollary to this is that I'm a nerd.

2. One of the things I'd like to do before I die is write a best-selling novel. I've had this idea for as long as I can remember. Maybe a semi-autobiographical novel-type. Or a historical novel. I go back and forth between the two.

3. I aspire to be a morning person. Morning People seem so...motivated. Unfortunately, I am a night owl who enjoys sleeping in. On the plus side, I married a night owl who enjoys sleeping in with me.

4. I'm a sucker for romantic comedies, and movies, books, and TV shows that make me cry. I weep like a baby when I watch "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" and "The Notebook" and "Armageddon," to name a few. A lot of books make me ball my eyes out as well.

5. I believe a good cry is good for the soul. Every once in a while I have to have a good cry. I never really know when it's coming, and then it just sweeps in like a tornado with no warning. (This Good Cry is not to be confused with The PMS Cry, which is totally different and comes like clockwork.) Luckily, Michael has known this about me for a long time, and knows exactly what to do when the tears come: just hug me and let me cry it out. He usually says something like, "you haven't had a good cry in a while, have you?" as I try to explain why I'm crying, though I'm unsure myself.

6. Certain issues get me fired up (see previous post), including, but not limited to the following: the inadequacies of our government to meet the needs of many people, especially in areas of education, poverty, and lack of medical care. And lately, I've been really bothered by the pretense that our country is diverse and "equal," when there is no doubt of the inequalities in our country, specifically in the area of racial segregation. We are doing a disservice to our young people to teach them that our country offers equal opportunities for minorities and the poor, that desegregation is a thing of the past, when it is a pure fact that segregation is not a thing of the past. The percentage of segregated schools in our nation rivals (is within a few percentage points of) the number at the time of Brown v. Board of Education in the mid-1950s and the height of the civil rights movement. We are not making much progress, and we should not let students grow up thinking we are. There is no such thing as equal access to education in this country. Not when I live two blocks from a brand new, multi-million dollar middle school building, and schools within an hour from here have outdated textbooks, underpaid and inexperienced teachers, buildings with little or no heat or air conditioning, and the list could go on and on. Not to mention that many of these poorer schools are 100% non-white, and many of the best schools are almost 100% white.

Ok, I went on a little tangent on the last one, but there you have it.

So now I have to tag 3 others:

Michael
Luke
Bev