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Friday, December 16, 2011

Pulling at my Heart Strings

I have gone back and forth on if I wanted to post anything about this but couldn't come up with the right words to express how sick it made me feel. After thinking about it for a few days I really don't care what words I use to express how I am feeling I am just going to get it out. So this is going to be a very wordy and LONG post so if you don't really care then that red X at the top right is for you. So here goes... Let me first say that there are many similarities between myself and the person that this horrible thing happened to. 1: We came from the same High School and Transferred to the Same school. The difference I transferred Freshman year and still didn't fit in after 4 years. This person transferred about a month ago their senior year. SO here it goes...

My mom who is a High School Senior Teacher at my old High School had a new student transfer in from the same High School that I transferred from. When my mom told me this I don't know why I got really excited. I have never met this kid, I don't even know their name... All I know is that they came from my HOME school and transferred to the School that I actually graduated from. Well this student is deaf and wears two hearing aids. My mom says that this student is very bright and smart and is a very very sweet kid. They were never wanting any special treatment because they came in the middle of the nine weeks and would have been behind on all the work. They were going to do all the work with no extra time, that's how dedicated this student was to fitting in right away. Well my mom had mentioned that this student hadn't been to class in a while and was going to call their counselor to double check to make sure everything was OK. On the same day that my mom was going to ask about this student their counselor came up to my mom with a withdrawal form for this student. My mom said, "Oh no, So and So withdrew? That's sad, they were such a sweet kid. Is everything alright?" This is what my mom was told by the counselor.
                             NO. The student was going off campus with two other students under the rouse that they were all going to smoke some pot. So they all went off campus to some woods (there is a park not to far from the school). When they got to the park the two kids decided that they were going to beat the SHIT out of this student with a CROWBAR!!!!

They really did a number on this poor defenseless CHILD. (I am crying just typing it here) Granted it was probably not a smart choice to leave school and go smoke pot but when you are new to a school that has such life long clicks, and you are trying to fit in and these people approach you and act like they are going to befriend you then beat the living shit out of you. WTF!!! Well needless to say the two baby boys that did this to the other student are no longer at the school, they were expelled completely, if you ask me they should be rotting in prison for a hate crime. OH did I mention the only reason they did this was to pick on the DEAF kid?!?!?!? Keep in mind that he spoke almost perfectly, there were only a few words that you could really tell he was deaf, he also wore two hearing aids. This student's mom didn't feel that he was safe at that school any more so she withdrew him and transferred him back to the school that he came from.

I am for the first time ever in almost 8 years since I graduated High School completely ashamed to say that I graduated from Churchill High School. I know first hand how the kids there bully you around, won't invite you into their clicks, look at you like you are a walking plague, and no matter how long you are there and what activities you are involved in the "popular" kids still won't accept you into their little group of people. From the day I transferred I only had a few friends, I wouldn't have traded them for anything, I would have liked to expand my circle of friends to the other girls that I cheered with for Four years. Every year when tryouts came around I had to stay away from all the other girls (accept my true friends) because they would try to get into my head and tell me I wasn't good enough to make the team again, or that they hoped I'd fall and break something, or that I didn't deserve to be on the team because I wasn't a true Churchill person. WTF? What is a true Churchill person? I understand that you grew up with all the same people for years but did it never occur to you that being a nice person to new people will help you grow as a person?? Anyway this is not about me...

I can relate to the hatred that some of the students expressed to anyone that was NEW... Although I never got beaten up or anything I know what it was like to be bullied for being "different" at Churchill.

I hope that if you are reading this you understand what HATE CRIMES are going on right here in our own little area. We need to BUMP up the efforts to help kids see that the 4 years they spend at a high school they are still nobodies... When they get out into the real world or go off to college NO ONE is going to GIVE A RATS ASS if you were in the popular group at your high school. And when you graduate from College NO ONE IS GOING TO GIVE A RATS ASS who you were in College either (unless you are a BAD ASS football player). When I graduated from High school I wanted to get as far away from everyone I knew at that school (accept for my few friends and my now husband), granted we have lost touch of a few people along the way because of where our lives have taken us but some of us are starting to find each other again. Now here I am back in the same area Teaching Special Ed to "Different" students, some of which I hope never get picked on for being a little different. I am also going back to school to get my masters degree in Special ED because I want to grow in my future and help more and more kids.

I truly don't understand how there can be that much hatred in a person at such a young age to think oh lets lure this deaf kid out to the woods and beat him with a CROWBAR!!!! What has this world come to when 17/18 year old kids are almost killing other kids their same age?? This area that the school is in is NOT know to have Gangs or anything like that, it's in a nice part of town, granted not everyone there has rich parents but no one is joining gangs to keep "safe" from a rival gang in the area. It was just two stupid kids being mean to another helpless child!!!

I don't know what else to say about any of this, Just that I am still sick to my stomach about what happened to this poor kid. I want to go and find this kid and tell them I am truly sorry for everything that has happened to them and I love them (yes love them; without even knowing who they are) I understand the need to fit in and hang out with other kids who you think are your friends, not to have people talk behind your backs and beat you up both physically and emotionally.

To the students who did the beating... I hope that you get the same treatment wherever you go in life. I hope that you are sitting in a prison being some mans slave and never getting a break from the HATE CRIME that you two committed!!!

Thursday, December 8, 2011

I'm Going Back

Well I have officially applied to Grad school!!! I have been talking about wanting to do it for a little bit but could never decide what I wanted my masters in. I wanted it to be something that I could use later on in my teaching career. I didn't want a pointless masters degree just to say that I had one. So after some consideration and hard time sitting in front of my computer at school looking at 25 different options I decided that I would go back to UTSA and get my masters in Special Education. With that being said I have also applied for different grants and scholarships to help me get thru the two or three years that it will take me to obtain my masters. I am excited and nervous at the same time. I really hope that I get accepted, I don't see why I wouldn't but the thought still crosses my mind. I am also nervous about being able to keep up with all the readings and classwork because I will have a two and a half year old by then. I applied to start in the Fall of 2012, just because I didn't think I would be ready to start in Jan/Feb. Who knows if I hear back soon I might start in the summer of  '12. My "sister" is getting her masters in counseling and it really hit me that I probably didn't want to stay the same and not be able to move up in my career. Also if I start next year or the following year I won't have to take the GRE because my GPA was high enough and it was within the 5 year limits. Jack is very supportive of me right now with wanting to continue my education and supports me in what I am doing. Hopefully he will continue to support me when I tell him I need him to watch Jackson because I have to get my paper finished or I have to get stuff done for my classroom. I am sure that he will help me out as much as he can, since he owns his own business he has a little more flexibility in how his schedule is set but it is also hard once it is set to change it because of his clients. We will manage like everyone else who has gone thru with this process. Just thought I'd share with you.

Monday, December 5, 2011

My Early Christmas


Jack and I celebrated our 2nd Wedding Anniversary the weekend after Thanksgiving this year. We went and stayed at a hotel in a nice area of San Antonio, The Quarry. We had a wonderful weekend together just the two of us, no little one (whom I missed even though we were maybe 20 minutes away from him), we had a nice spa trip!! Well while we were trying to waste some time before our Spa trip we were driving around looking at all the shops in The Quarry. Well I have been wanting a digital SLR camera for about 2 years now and because of the cost have not really pushed to get one. Well now when people are asking me what I want for Christmas I have been telling them "Don't worry about getting me anything, I'm good" because I really have only wanted this camera for a while. Well my Husband knows how I feel about my cameras so we went into this shop Wolf Camera just to look and get an idea of prices and camera brands. I have looked at Cannon and Nikon for as long as I can remember and don't really care which one I was gifted with because they are both really good brands and cameras. So anyway we went into this shop because Jack has seen a commercial for a new Sony camera that was about the size of a small digital camera but had the adjustable lenses (like I wanted). We were talking to this really nice salesman about all the different features and qualities that this perticiular camera had. In talking to the salesman I mentioned that I really wanted a bigger Digital SLR camera becasue I was oldschool and really liked looking thru the eyepiece and zooming in and all that silly stuff that digital cameras do for you now. I also told him that brand names meant nothing to me because they were all good and were all competing with each other to stay on top so they were all good in my eyes. So he intoduced us to this little baby.
The Sony Alpha. I played around with it for about 10 minutes in the store and fell in love!!! I loved the fact that it had a live view screen and a sensor that when you put your eye up to the eye piece the screen automatically switches so that you can see all your options in the eye piece!!! So after playing with it for a little bit and talking about prices and all the other things that I would need, we decided to leave and talk aobut it. We are sitting in the truck talking it over and looking on our phones to see if there was a better price at another store that we could go to at a later time. So as we are sitting in the truck talking about it and deciding that this store really did have the best deal, we would be getting free photography classes as well as one-on-one classes about my specific camera that we could both go to. So we see the salesman leaving for his lunch and Jack jumps out of the truck to stop and ask how long he would be so that we could come back and deal with him. This poor man postpones his lunch so that he can go back into the store and help us get everything that we would need for my camera. So on top of the camera we got a camera bag, a memory card, extra warranty, photography classes as a two for one deal, and an extra telascopic lens for distance. 

I wish that I had a picture of my actual camera but taking that picture is a bit hard in my mind... I'll figure out something and post it here. So I have used the camera several times since we got it and am loving it more and more every day. I love playing around with the different settings and taking pictures of Jackson. I will post some pictures soon that I took with my new camera.

Sorry this was so long, but I feel like I haven't really posted anything in a long time. (Not that anyone is reading this anyway).