So, I looked today, and January 20th was my last blog post. There have been many things that have kept my plate full recently that just did not allow me time to do some serious thinking about topics for a blog. However, I love to blog and I didn't want to just fade to black on the deal, so here I am. I am still plugging away at college. This semester I am taking three classes with Bemidji State University to continue my progress towards a teaching degree. There have moments, as my wife Kari would say, that have been ultra stressful with trying to make everything fit in timely manner. I am continuing to work full-time at my job as a paraprofessional at a school. As I have mentioned in the past, I work with a lot of students who have many behavior and mental health issues. To follow my 2015 New Year's Resolution of speaking up more often, I went to a staff meeting at my school and voiced a concern of not receiving enough mental health training. So, prior to voicing this concern, I did some problem solving to get the ball rolling on my concern. I did some research on the web and discovered that a mental health agency does this big conference in Duluth, MN over the course of three days. I also found out that 36% of the attendees on average work in schools. This excited me. I went to our second of two superintendents and asked permission to attend this workshop. The Superintendent gave approval for two to three staff to go. My wife Kari, who is the Behavior Specialist of the school I work at, is also attending the conference. At a very recent staff meeting, I told the staff that there was another spot available if someone wanted to attend the conference, and no one unfortunately took the spot. So the two of us will be attending, and I intend to create some Prezi presentations to present to our staff on staff development days so I can do my part to help my co-workers be more prepared for the wide variety of craziness that we deal with on a daily basis.
In another piece of exciting news, for the past five years I have coordinated an upcycling program at my school that is called Terracycle. Terracycle is a company that takes trash and upcycles it into new reusable products, thus keeping the trash out of the landfill as a result. The bonus to getting schools involved in this project or movement, is that schools can collect the materials and have it shipped to Terracycle. Terracycle covers the shipping costs and pays each collection of trash a certain amount per piece of trash. This is a great lesson for our students to learn. As a coordinator, it is a ton of work as I jumped into this with both feet, and probably way too fast, but I can go to sleep at night knowing that I am doing my part keeping trash out of the landfills that filling up way too fast. So, a couple of years ago, we received notification that we were one of the top 100 sites for collecting cheese packaging and we got a $10.00 bonus to our fundraising account with Terracycle. About three weeks ago, our school did it again. This time we were one of the top ten Terracycle sites in the nation who participate in the Scotch Tape Brigade. The Scotch Tape Brigade obviously is sponsored by Scotch Tape and we submitted 660 disposable tape dispensers and cores (the things in the middle of the tape roll) in one month. So, I received an email from Terracycle with news about being one of the top ten in the nation and this time we were going to receive a $50.00 bonus to our Terracycle fundraising account. This was pretty good. This happened because of the students and my co-workers being supportive of the program. It was a great team effort. Last Tuesday, I had people coming up to me and telling me that they liked the article in the newspaper. I had no idea what they were talking about, and I needed to find out what they were talking about as my curiosity was at a maximum level. I discovered that there was a small article in the Brainerd Dispatch newspaper and also in the Mille Lacs Messenger newspaper that is more local to the school I work in. After I read both of the articles, I had discovered that Terracycle themselves had done the press releases and I will admit, I was pretty proud. I have put links below to both of the short articles. I encourage you to read them.
Mille Lacs Academy School Wins Recycling Contest
MLA School Wins National Award
Finally, I want to mention that I am going to start another blog. I am a die-hard Minnesota sports fan and it usually drives my wife crazy most days as she is not. Anyways, I want to do something that allows me to do something with my passion for Minnesota sports. So, in the very near future, I plan to launch a second blog that focuses on Minnesota Sports. I think it will be relaxing for me personally talking about a topic that I love. So, look for that very soon. The Blogging Rookie, which is my personal blog, will still be going on as normal. The sports blog is not replacing my personal blog. I will be posting both. As far as my personal blog goes, many of you have been reading my blog posts since the beginning, which was last fall. One of the blog posts entitled, "Even Without A Dad, Things Can Turn Out Right", is so far the most read blog posting of all my blog postings so far. This was a hot button topic for some and it created some sharp reactions that I am still affected by to this present day. I planned on including an update on this in this blog posting, but I think I will wait to the next one. What I learned about this, is that expressing honest feelings respectfully can unfortunately have some painful consequences. I will fill you in more in my next Blogging Rookie post, so look for that soon.
Have a great day and feel free to comment on any of my blogs.
