Here we go again

 I accidentally revealed this blog’s existence the other day. I was sharing the second definition of “apostrophe” as a random fact of the day with a friend and mentioned this blog off-hand. She noticed. It led to the rediscovery of what has become a time capsule of my early twenties, and I’ve been stewing over whether to start posting again.

My last post neglected to mention that I had a boyfriend I was completely smitten with. It was my policy to not name boyfriends (I was single most of the time I was writing, obviously) because the blog was about me, and I didn’t want to have to delete them later. Well, he never got deleted and we’ve been married for over 10 years now, with 4 children, a house, and a minivan.

In considering resurrecting this blog, I’ve been thinking about what I would even say. As a stay-at-home-mom (spoiler alert! I taught Physics for three years before my oldest was born. I’ve tutored online over the years and I WILL get my masters someday to restart that part of my life. I still love teaching Physics!), so much of my life rotates around my kids and my home. I don’t want that for my blog. Can’t I be the main character somewhere?

That’s not fair—I am the main character in our home, in the same way the conductor is the main character of an orchestra (at this point, an elementary school orchestra, so often out of tune, off timing, and in general an adorable train wreck). But I would like a chance to write as an individual,  to step off my conductor’s podium and take a stroll with my thoughts. I have zero readers left, so it will be written for just myself—or rather, it will be an aptly named apostrophe.

A New Start

My life has had a lot of craziness recently. As I mentioned, I went to California, used public transit, and didn't sleep. The result: I go Mono. Worst thing ever.
Then, three weeks later, I started my career as a High School Physics Teacher. Thankfully, God is good, and the first day that I felt 100% happened to be the first day of school. A total miracle.
That did put me in the place of starting school feeling very unprepared, but I have felt humbled, and I know that this is an opportunity for me to rely on God. I can't do this on my own. Today I finished my third day of school, and it is going well. I haven't gotten to know my students very well yet (I have taken away two phones already, but that is another story), so I haven't gotten to do the part I love yet, but that will come.
Another adventure has been that my classroom was under construction and I couldn't use it for the first day of school. I am temporarily in the Biology Lab room. That has worked out just fine, but will be a great story some day. In way, it has helped me not stress over my room because I couldn't. God took that stress out of my hands to where it wasn't in my control anymore, so now I am perfectly okay with the fact that my room is not cute. It is as empty as a racquetball court. It will all come in time. It is a new adventure, a stressful one, but everything going according to God's timing and plan. Everything is working out. It's gonna be a great year. :)

My classroom. They did finish painting it, But it is
still basically this empty. That is a random
vaulted ceiling in the middle.

This is the classroom I am using temporarily. It is a
tight fit for my 40 AP students (one big class),
but it has windows, which is nice.

My Brother Got Married

I mentioned that it would happen, but Willie got MARRIED! Craziness. I am so happy for him, though. We all love Stephanie, so that's good, too. Here are some pictures that I took from the big day. There are other better pictures, not taken on my phone, but there you go. :)

The happy couple at the reception

The parents

I have a picture of each of the siblings at the temple. It was so fun to have us all there.

What a handsome man.

Just barely married.

What a happy day!

Physics in California

I have a lot to update you about, but first I thought I would post about Physics.
Surprised? Yeah, me neither.
I mentioned in my last post that I was hired to do physics research for BYU over the summer. Well, that happened. I worked 8-5 every day doing research. It was a good job. I loved my coworkers and my work. Most of the time I just fixed broken things, and broke new things to fix. In the end, we did get it all working, and took some cool data.
Well, Physicists want their data to be reproducible. So we decided to go get the same data on someone else's equipment. Some BIG somebody else's equipment. We got on a plane and flew to use the Advance Light Source at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They have an sychrotron--a big thing that circles electrons around at near the speed of light--that produces the light we needed to study, and they have awesome equipment to study that light. SWEET.
Their equipment is pretty cool, and under fairly high demand, so we got the night shift. We did research all night, played around Oakland and San Francisco all day, and barely slept for three days.
Here are some pictures of my adventure:

The view from our very nice Marriot Hotel room in downtown Oakland.

Gotta love unnecessary quotations. :)

This was our lab station, beamline 6.3.2.

Dr. Turley looking like a ghost behind the plastic shield
 by the chamber where we tested stuff.

This was the computer program we used. It was niiiiice. :)

Me on a ferry on the way to San Francisco (the one with a bow).

An Awesome street performer that pretended to be a robot in San Fran.

This black lady drove our bus. She was very friendly.

Summer Joy

Hey all. I thought I would send an updater your way. :)
First of all, I graduated!! I always thought that I would never feel ready to be done with my education, but it felt so right and so fulfilling to look back at all that I have done at BYU. It just feels great.

Wahooo!!!

I already mentioned in a previous post that I have a job teaching at Mountain View High School in Orem starting in the Fall. I am super excited about it. But I needed something to fill my time (and make some dollars) for the summer. I was thinking about looking for a job when God intervened. He literally threw the perfect job for me out of heaven.
See, one day, I was sitting at home and noticed I had a missed call from my professor at BYU. I called him back and he told me that BYU had a job opening and were looking for someone to fill it ASAP. The job was for a local teacher to do research for BYU for the summer. The teacher would be paid their teacher salary to work full time for the summer, and also get a $1200 budget to buy equipment for their classroom. What is not to like? They asked me if I wanted the job and I said yes. What a blessing! How often do people just have jobs thrown at them like that!
Just like that, I got a summer job. I am working in the Extreme Ultraviolet research group. The short explanation of what I do is fix equipment and clean it. The longer version is that we want to figure out what materials reflect Extreme Ultraviolet (XUV) light the best. The problem is that XUV has so much energy that it is absorbed by everything. And it is hard to make (the light, I mean. As well as the mirrors). A girl I work with is working to make the mirrors, but mostly I am the handyman in the lab that is working to fix broken equipment. I am working to make the plasma work (it worked today!) because that is our source of light. I am getting good with wrenches, troubleshooting electronic connections, soldering, and making vacuum seals tight (we have to be under super low pressure because air absorbs XUV).

Me taking the plasma chamber apart to clean it. The big black
 part is where we reflect the light off of stuff. This monster
of a machine is my life.

That probably doesn't make sense, but really, I am not doing very much physics. I am enjoying myself, though. It is also nice to have an 8 to 5 job.
My calling is the Temple Preparation teacher, and I LOVE IT. I don't have news about that, but everyone should go to the temple. It is the best. :)
Oh, big news: my beloved little brother is getting married.

I approve. I always thought it would be hard to have my brother get married, but Stephanie is amazing. She is a great match for my brother. I feel completely comfortable around them and I am happy for them. Life is changing! What an exciting day!

A Night to Remember

This last weekend was our ward Oscar's Night. All of the FHE groups made a movie and then we had a black tie event to view them and vote for Best Film, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress.

It was so much fun to dress up and eat a delicious free meal, but the best part was watching the movies that we all made. See, this ward takes the Oscars seriously. The FHE groups spend hours and days on these movies, and they turn out SO WELL.
Our group decided to do a Film Noir style movie (kinda). Here is a link to the final product and don't judge my acting. I just did the best I could.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U65N8GqXl_w_e8JEmF3q6pQYIYUFFtkG/view?usp=drivesdk

If you want to see other films shown that night, let me know and I'll see what I can do.
I the end we swept four of the five awards given that night. We won best film, Grant won best Actor, LaNaya won best Actress, and Brandt (aka "Rose") won Best Supporting Actor (He almost won Best Supporting Actress, too).
The Oscars were definitely a Night To Remember.

Teaching

It has been a crazy and amazing semester. More than once I have tried to sit down and write about my student teaching experience, but there is so much to say it makes it difficult.
The biggest thing is that teaching is hard, but so rewarding. Hard for different reasons than I thought, and rewarding in ways I didn't expect. It isn't hard to plan lessons, get students to test well, do their homework, or even behave in class.
What is hard is getting them to change the way they think and really learn. I want the way they view the world to change because of Physics. I want them to learn to be problem solvers and world observers, and curious, life-long learners.
What is rewarding is not teaching a good lesson. It is rewarding when the students teach a good lesson and I didn't do much at all. What is rewarding is building personal relationships with them and caring about what is hard for them outside of Physics.
The thing about student teaching that I have struggled the most with is realizing that the way I viewed education my whole life up to this point is wrong. I knew that lecture wasn't the most effective way for students to learn, but I didn't really know it. Now I do. Direct instruction followed by group or individual work on homework isn't effective either. I want my students to be discovering, not for me to get a chance to tell them all of the things I think are exciting.
I don't know if that will make sense to the non-teacher world, but teachers know (or at least good teachers) that the classroom can't be about them or they will be a failure.

"It is the pupil that must be put into action. When the teacher takes the spotlight, becomes the star of the show, does all the talking, and otherwise takes over all of the activity, it is almost certain that [she] is interfering with the learning of the class members." (Asahel D. Woodruff, Teacher the Gospel [1962], 37; in Virginia H. Pearce, "The Ordinary Classroom--A Powerful Place for Steady and Continued Growth," Ensign, Nov. 1996, 12)

On a lighter note, being a teacher is fun for a lot of reasons, and one of those is that the students are just so silly. High school is quite the eventful time in a person's life!
I have one student who really makes me laugh. He is so well meaning and so happy, and so distracted. One day I walked up to check on how his homework was going. I found him not working on the problem at all and asked him about it. He responded, "Miss Atkin, I am so sorry. I went to do the problem and I was going to really try, but then I accidentally drew my calculator instead..." He dropped his gaze sheepishly to his paper. I looked at his paper, and sure enough, there was a perfect, life-sized drawing of his calculator. "And then Amanda drew a Flappy bird on it..." and there on the screen of the calculator was a flappy bird, a creature from a new popular game for smart phones that I only became aware of because of my students. Oh, dear. The thing is, I couldn't be mad because I knew that he was telling the truth. You could really say this student was without guile. He meant no harm, and really tries his best, but gets a bit distracted sometimes.
Another day a similar thing happened, but he had drawn a Chinese man with a long mustache. Oh, dear. I can't help but smile. Or when my students tell me about "Swag Energy" as one of our energy types. Or when they tell me about the dance over the weekend, or turning 16, or getting their Learner's Permit to drive, or when they make the "mind blown" hand gesture more than once in a lesson, or....
Teaching is the life.
Which is why I am doing it. :) Most readers know this by now, but I have accepted a job teaching in the fall at Mountain View High School in Orem. I will be the one and only Physics teacher there. I will teach Conceptual (without much math), Honors, and AP Physics (which is a lot for a first year teacher). It will be a challenge, but a good challenge. I go through phases of being scared out of my mind and being super excited. It will be a great experience. I am really blessed to get a job so soon and so close. The classroom is big and fairly well equipped.
I'm going to be a teacher! EXCITED! :)