Good Things

Today was one of those warm, beautiful, sunshine days that bring the BoDeans song "Good Things" to my brain. The bass line in that tune is like wind blowing through the trees and then the melodious vocals of Sammy & Kurt rise up like fog through the song.

As it was today that I share some great news I got over the weekend. About a month ago I had submitted a request to the State of Illinois Board of Education to determine if I had enough college credit to teach high school English. I've already been certified to teach Middle School English in addition to Social Studies and Business & Computer Science, which is in and of itself a lot of certification! I had counted the number of credits I had and if they accepted all of the speech, literature and composition classes I had then I could make the cut. Sure enough, I received a letter in reply stating that I had enough credit and would simply (or not so simply) need to take the state English Language Arts content exam. The alternative is taking 8 more credits which is a bit more expensive and a lot more work. I'll try for the $100 test first!

As with any ordinary day though, life presents its ups and downs, each of those in turn usually having both ups and downs in some way. My new (old) car has been having problems since Thursday. It has been jumpy and revving a lot higher than normal. I've been hitching rides from co-workers over the last few days from the Marathon to Prom and to work yesterday. I finally got the car to a local dealer today. It was fateful that I had to take today off due to a luncheon with the Rotary which sponsors some of the work done in the Business Ed department at Urbana High. Each of the vocational programs at UHS nominate a student of the year and so I sat with my student, her parents, my fellow business ed teachers and our school Principal at the Urbana Country Club for the Rotary celebration lunch.

How does this equate to a day off, you ask? Our district requires either a full or half day off per our contract. So to miss just the last 1/2 hour of my morning class I still had to take off the entire morning. The lunch went into the afternoon hours so I had to take the afternoon off to. Fortuitous because I could take my car in and just stay low key the rest of the day until it was done. That's not really my personality so I got the ride from school, wrote my final exam for Coop and by the time I got the call on my car, was heading for lunch.

After lunch I returned to my office and did a ton of filing and organizing (I've just reorganized my filing cabinet) and called most of my employers. Frankly, I was doing a TON of work on a day off but I had nowhere else to go! Our final new teacher meeting was after school, so it was beneficial to get work done and stay there. It felt good to. A lot of little accomplishments!

While the car issue may seem like a down moment, and at first it truly was, it turned out to be an act of God. You see, the car was my grandmother's car. It then became my mom's car when Gram stopped driving and now I own it. Turns out, Gram's last IRS check came in the mail this week - for almost the same amount as the repair. It was a weird phone call between my mother and I but in the end she gave me a big case of goosebumps when she said, "Grandma is still taking care of her car." W-O-W.

So the good and the bad can often meld together. What seems really bad can turn out to be one of the best things that ever happened. Take all those English classes I took in the early years of undergrad at Augustana. I wrote 53 papers in 10 weeks. I'm not exaggerating its just that I wrote so many and it seemed so outrageous at the time that I've never forgotten the number. Those weeks taught me how to type faster and better. And drastically improved my writing ability. I probably wouldn't be blogging or writing books (Yeah, that's a blog for another time) or even trying to get certified in English were it not for those classes.

Give anything a little time, clarity and distance and you can find the glass half full. There is a reason for everything. How are you going to choose to look at it?

"See I can see, good things for you and I..." =BoDeans