Another chapter

Another chapter in our RV life might soon begin.  After two and a half years living in our Class A Bounder, we are considering renting a house in Port St Lucie, Fla.  There are many, many advantages to living in our RV.  First, we can’t accumulate stuff like we did for 30 years in our home in Massachusetts.  The RV is very easy maintenance on the inside with barely an hour’s worth of cleaning a week.  There is no yard work and someone else maintains the pool.  There is plenty of opportunity to socialize or not.  Best of all, we have everything we need in the Bounder:  a good bed, ice maker, washer-dryer,  convection oven/microwave, and of course a stove top.  The disadvantages for us are our dogs, the golden retrievers. 

We love our dogs and we were very excited to have time to play with them when we retired.  When we returned to work they protested in the worse possible way.  Because we left them at home alone when we were still working in Ma, we tried that with the RV.  At first it was okay leaving them in the RV while we went out to dinner or shopping.  Leaving them for hours proved disastrous when  we returned to work.  At one point they broke out of a locked RV and attacked another dog.  The dog survived  and we paid all the vet bills but it made us very wary of leaving them alone.  We got a crate for the male, but he attempted to break out of that by bending the cage with his nose.  It was obvious that he would soon hurt himself if we didn’t try to do something else.  Our situation again changed rapidly when small dogs were allow by their owners to come on our RV site.  Even though my dogs were tied they attempted to lunge at the small dogs, scared their owners enough to complain, and we were promptly thrown out of the camp ground.  We found a new place, but the RV sites are much smaller.  Now that the season is about to start, we are very concerned about our dogs.

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Working as a tutor with the Seminole Indians on the reservation is a great experience.  Some of the students I work with are doing virtual school, being home-schooled by me, or  working on their GED.  All are polite and motivated to learn which is a big difference from the many of the students I worked with in Massachusetts.  Teaching is again enjoyable and rewarding, besides which, I am learning about the Seminole history and culture.  This new knowledge has raised many questions for me about Native Americans in general.  Having grown up in the 50s and 60s watching Westerns, I got a very negative view of our history regarding these indigenous people.  And of course, history books all but ignored Native Americans.  In literature, some Native American writings started to creep into what teachers could teach.  Many of us chose to ignore these possible teaching materials because we knew we didn’t really have the background to explain and help students understand.  There were so many “other” things to read and study on which we had been school ad nausium  about all those dead white guys.  Times have changed, I’m aware, in many of the states especially those with larger Native American populations.  The Northeast hasn’t, which is where I spent all of my educational career, until now.

More about me

I have been an educator for more than 25 years.  Growing up I loved school because my aunts and uncle were in education.  Because I loved my aunts, especially my aunt, Connie, I thought I wanted to become a teacher.  By the time I reached high school, family problems had taken their toll and I turned into a rebellious teen.  Not too rebellious – I didn’t want trouble in the way of “loss of affection” – but enough so that I didn’t want to be a teacher any longer.  Besides, I was being strongly urged to be a teacher.  In the end, after just barely making it into college, I decided first to be a music teacher, then later, changed my mind and decided to be a drama teacher.  Upon graduating with a degree after 3 ½ years of school, I never received certification as a teacher, because I had missed practice teaching.  Fast forward through 8 years which included marriage and three children, I became a substitute teacher to earn some extra money while my own children were in school.  I soon discovered that I loved working with children (middle school).    More to come……….

Hello

Hi Everyone!  My name is Irene and I am a semi-retired teacher from Massachusetts now living and working part time as a tutor on a Seminole reservation in Florida.  Over the past three years there have been many changes in my life from getting rid of 30 years of “stuff” and giving up a great education job, to learning to have different priorities and values.  Some of these changes have been easy and some very difficult.  I’m not sure if anyone will follow this, but you might find my ideas challenging yours.  I invite all comments and hope to answer most.