A Fresh Start

If you visit this blog regularly, you may have noticed that there has been a dearth of updates over the past 18 months or so. This was due to some major life events (i.e. motherhood) – having to adjust to our new family addition while continuing to work full time as a school-based SLP left little to no time for blogging. Being a perfectionist I was admittedly feeling a bit discouraged, too – if I can’t blog consistently / do it well, I felt like I shouldn’t be doing it at all. Damn you, Type A personality!

Things have finally calmed down a little bit in my personal life, and I am eager to get back into the swing of things! I figured the beginning of a new school year is the perfect time to do so. In order to motivate myself, I had the ladies at Blogs Fit For a Queen overhaul my blog template, giving this place a new look.

I love the beginning of the school year and I am excited to share the fun things we are doing in my Speech room! Stay tuned...

The End of the School Year!

The end of the school year has finally arrived! Although I only have a week of break between now and the beginning of our Extended School Year program, I feel content in how much I have accomplished this year. Between opening up my TPT store and starting this blog (I am hoping to provide more consistent updates again now that the end-of-the-schoolyear-stress is complete), I saw amazing growth in some of my students and have formed new and lasting professional relationships with some of the teachers at my site. This year I really started to feel like part of the team! As much as I complained the last few months, I guess it was a good year in the end.

And, while I have never been excited to return to work after the summer, this year I am! I will be moving from a broom-closet sized speech room into a larger room with storage space, a white board, and a document camera!!! My mind is already churning as to how the space can be used. But first, summer :).

~Viola

First World Problems

I have taken the last few weeks off from blogging, only because I felt myself getting really burned out. Tons of IEPs, the holidays, returning to work after the break and being faced with a pile of things that needed to be done -- there were just a lot of days where I had to take a step back and breathe. I think most of us get to this point once in a while. There are so many frustrations we face in our line of work and at the end of the day I still sometimes ask myself whether all of my efforts are really making a difference for these kids. It just feels that there aren't enough hours in the day to accomplish the things we need to get done. 

With these feelings of discouragement I decided that I needed a little air from anything therapy-related outside of my job, which included blogging as well as creating materials. I gave myself some time to rearrange my thoughts and looking at my problems from a different perspective. Things could be so much better, but they could also be a whole lot worse. So let's sit back and think about the negative things about our jobs, but then put them into a different light:

• Sometimes I just don't know if therapy is making a difference for some of these kids ...but at least it won't hurt them!
• Writing reports takes forever ...but at least I have tons of templates now, making the process a little bit faster.
• My $250 budget/year to use on both conferences and therapy materials never seems to be enough ...but at least I have the talent needed to make a lot of my own materials.
• I feel like I don't get much done despite getting to work at 6:30am every day ...but I have a great relationship with our custodian - we're the only two people there at that hour.
• I spend a lot of money out of pocket on games and therapy materials ...but at least they now belong to me.
• A lot of my students' progress is slow ...but at least they're making progress.
• There are a lot of difficult parents ...but for every difficult parent there are 10 that are great to work with.
• Most of my students don't follow through with their homework ...but I have to buy fewer special toys for the homework prizebox.
• Some IEPs are extremely stressful ...but I am part of a super supportive special ed team.
• There are still 79 days of school left ...but then we get a 10-week long summer break!
• My summer will likely be spent teaching Extended School Year to make ends meet ...but it's only half-days!
• My TpT store isn't turning as much of a profit as I had hoped given all the hours I've put into making materials ...but it pays the phone bill.
• Most of my weekends are spent doing something work-related ...but I won't have to scramble as much during the week.
• I'm not always sure that my students will generalize their skills ...but we have a super supportive general education team at our site.
• All of us on teacher salaries are drastically underpaid ...but at least I'm still new enough to the district where I move up a little bit on the payscale each year and get to look forward to a raise.
• Sometimes my students make me cry ...but more often, they make me laugh.
• My Speech room is too small to store my things ...but at least I won't lose anything.
• I don't have time to plan sessions ...but I usually come up with something anyway.
• And most importantly: if I had not become an SLP I would not have met my Master clinician during my school-based internship who has become my best friend.

These are just a few of the things we face, but with some effort you can put a new spin on  almost all of them. Looking at it from a different angle really does help. It is nice to feel motivated again to jump right back into things!

Reading over this again now, I realize that all of these things are total first world problems. Life really isn't so bad!

~Viola