Faith, Hope, and Love

For work, we recently had to take the StrengthsFinder test. The test gives you your top 5 "talents" and those talents, plus knowledge and skills, become your strengths and can make you better at whatever you do in life (in this case, teaching). Doing this made me think: What if my students were equally aware of who they are and what natural talents they have because of their personality? How might this shape how they work in class? And if I am aware of their talents, how might I better relate to my students? Could it make me a better teacher if I knew both my talents and my students ? Well, we're giving it a shot. And so during the 6th grade Culture/Testing Week, one of the sessions will be about personalities. I'm not actually teaching/leading it, but I helped plan it and during that process we took a variety of tests to figure out the simplest version for 11- and 12-year-olds. We settled on the True Colors test (another version we considered and could be c...

Earlier today I decided to be a bit more productive than I usually am after my 4-hour stint at my part-time job and made my way to the bookstore hoping to find some "direction." Ever since I lost my magazine job (and to be honest, even a few months before then), I've been feeling a bit jaded and confused. I'm suddenly wondering if what I always wanted to do with my life is what I'm supposed  to be doing, and asking myself if the profession I've always dreamed of pursing since I was about five-years-old is really for me. What if I'm honestly just no good at it? What if I just thought  I was? I had one day left on my "birthday gift" from Borders (I got a free raspberry-lemony iced tea!), so it seemed like the place to be. In the reference section, I grabbed a Writer's Market hoping to discover a few new avenues and alleys I never thought to walk down before. In the job section, I found "Fired to Hired," which I embarrassingly picked ...