A(nother) place to write

So, I've got all this stuff going on at home and now school got more complicated. It seems that my license expired and it wasn't supposed to. I took 6 graduate education hours from a local university back in the summer of 2004 and I sent them all my paperwork and told them I needed my license renewed. In the fall I checked the professional standards website and it showed that my license had no expiration date. Hurrah, I thought, everything is OK. No worries I didn't think about it again.

This semester I was checking on my son's and daughter's teachers, which I like to do every year and I decided to print out my certificate. To my surprise it had expired. So I called my university to find out what the problem was. Apparently my paperwork was lost. They were surprised that my district had not discovered this. Added to this I had recently sent my master's degree from UH to my district. So now I am trying to figure it all out. I am sure they will renew my license as soon as all the paperwork is submitted but it is nerve-wracking knowing that I am currently expired.

In addition my principal has asked me to mentor a new teacher. Now I have mentored other teachers in Houston and was trained by UH to do this. He wanted me to mentor the male teacher here and he had matched up the male ESL teacher with the female teacher in my dept. I asked for him to switch this since I have already started mentoring the female teacher informally and I feel more comfortable with this arrangement. He said no problem. The ESL teacher and I were chosen because we are the two teachers here with master's degrees. I've had my master's degree since 1982 but the advisors at IUS told me not to put my master's on my certification because I would "never find a job with a master's, and I would be too overqualified". Now I wonder if I could have used my master's degree for certification all along. Maybe they told me this so I would continue taking 2 courses at their university every 5 years.

I enjoy taking courses so in reality their fear was unfounded. Of course they do not know me and maybe I'm just being paranoid. I do wish to take their summer wildflowers course offered every few years but so far I have been working when they have offered it or I haven't been able to afford it, but that's another story.

Harvest Homecoming is upon us and I've got a zillion things to do.