First Post!

So I was inspired from a few of my friends to start my own blog. I always love reading their blogs to see what they are up to, especially since I have graduated from college and a lot of my friends have moved away from Minnesota. And now I am on that list of people moving away...So this is a great way for my friends who still live in the cities or those who live elsewhere to keep updated on my life and to update me on their lives!

My cats in my new room in Duluth!

In the end of September I moved up to Duluth to become a Language Arts Interventionist at a charter middle school. This job is a dream come true, I never realized how much I loved reading with students until I had the chance to be an interventionist last year in Brooklyn Center in an elementary school. While most of my friends find it odd that I am a language arts teacher and not a math teacher, I am surprised too. While I always pictured myself as a general education classroom teacher or a middle school math teacher, this seems to be a perfect fit for me.

While middle schoolers can be a struggle to work with because of all the hormones and the the personal life stuggles they are going through, they are a blast to work with! I really connect with them and love to teach with them and love to carry on a conversation with them (not the same conversation you would have with a 1st grader!) Most of the time a conversation I have with a student will make my day brighter no matter how tired or how many meetings I have that day, they just have a great train of thought at 4pm on a Friday...

Snow Day!

Duluth is a beautiful city to live in, it does have its quirks...All the hills are lovely, though I am lucky to live on top of the hill and my school is on the hill, so I'm pretty lucky to avoid most major hills. Duluth is a lot smaller than Minneapolis, and I am getting used to the different stores that they have here and the ones that they don't have here. I forget that sometimes some stores that I am so used to that are in the Mall of America are not in any other mall in Minnesota, so I just have to remind myself that I will have to make a special shopping trip when I hit the cities. We also already had a snow day! My apartment and school got about 3 inches of snow in October, but the Department of Transportation closed schools because of the busses and the airport got about 7 inches of snow, so yeah for us! But just wondering how the rest of the winter is going to go! I am also getting used to the fog! Some mornings when I leave my apartment at 7am, the ground is so covered with fog that I can maybe see 15 ft in front of me, I have never seen so much fog before!

Fog is taking over the school!

The lingo is also different "up here". I've had many students and coworkers politely correct me (well my coworkers are polite about it...). Such as: "Where are you living in Duluth?" "Oh, I'm living South of Miller Hill Mall." huh... Correct answer: "I live down the hill from the Miller Hill Mall" . I'm so used to learning NSEW directions when living in Minneapolis, my dad would be proud to know that I can almost always say what direction I am facing without looking at my compass in my car! But this is not language that they use up here, so just more new things to take in.


Over all I love it up here! Still learning my way around the city and meeting tons of new people! So I'm taking it slow and excited for what's going to come next!