Journey  Journal 

I have been working on a prototype of an interactive book about how we, as librarians (and other educators in general) can help support our LGBTQIA+ students in spite of the huge influx in bans that are targeting the rainbow community. This is broken up into three parts, with the last part being the bulk of the book. 

Part 1 - What is being banned, and what are the reasons?

Part 2 - The impact and why these bans are coming about?

Part 3 - Tips for Librarians 

Please feel free to take a look at the book that I have translated into a slideshow format! Keep in mind that it's just a prototype, so it's a little messy, but it took a quite a while to make. 

Originally, I started this for fun. My Weebly site is a bit outdated and I wanted to transfer more to my primary Gmail account. I kept adding on more things. I was originally going to just make this a blog and art portfolio, but I wanted to share my lesson plans and book reviews. Perhaps, I'll add more later on, but for now I'll stick to this. The journal itself is going to be to track personal and career orientated events. 

As of now, I'm about halfway through my first two graduate classes. It's been hectic the last few weeks thanks to overbooking myself, but it should slow down soon. I'm excited to have an opportunity to meet with Out Youth, a wonderful LGBTQIA+ organization, to possibly get an internship as their librarian assistant. I really hope it pays, though. 

We've been learning about school library management, and it's quite daunting. There's a lot of working parts to keep track of, but I'm really looking forward to it. I also think this program will prepare for work much better than my alternative certification program. 

The inquiry and information seeking class would've been so helpful to take before I taught AP Art. That class could've gone much better, though some of the blame falls on the super crappy fall semester at the beginning of the year. I really enjoy this class, and I am looking forward to finishing it. 

My husband and I will celebrate our 4th wedding anniversary next week. So much has happened in the last few years that it's both gone by so fast, but so slow as well. 

Big Events from the Last 4 Years - Buckle in, it's a wild ride.

• My husband and I worked the same really tough teacher assistant job at the same school. 

• We got married and went on our honeymoon. 

• We kept working the same grueling job. 

• We moved from a 3rd floor apartment to a 1st floor apartment.

• Then spring break never ended. Played video games almost all day and got paid till the school year ended.

• My father was diagnosed with cancer. 

• My husband's father was diagnosed with cancer. 

• We both got jobs as teachers. Myself at Manor Senior High and my husband as a middle school English teacher for 8th grade. 

• Being first year teachers during COVID was so rough. I stopped eating well due to stress, and my husband also had negative side effects.  

• The Snowpocalypse of 2021 cause a pipe to burst in a neighboring apartment, so we crammed 2 cats, 3 snakes, and a lizard into a 500 sq ft apartment with our two friends and their cat. We got really close. 

• We had to move. I cried when I got the news that they wouldn't be giving us our apartment back, and my principal and assistant principals were very supportive. 

• We found a dingy cave of an apartment, and the only good thing was that there were two bathrooms. 

• My father passed during the summer of 2021, however Michael's father is doing much better now. 

• Things evened out for about a year until the summer of 2022. We had a wedding right towards the beginning of school, and it was nice to be there for our friends, but it was just terrible timing and tensions were high. 

• My classes were incredibly stressful. Really difficult students, a hard time with classroom management, and I didn't have enough time to prepare for the year because of the wedding. 

• In October 2022, our other friends, the ones who provided shelter during COVID, got married and that was a lot of fun.

• I decided to apply for grad school to become a librarian after way too much test proctoring. 

• Then we decided to also move because I couldn't take the cruddy apartment anymore. 

• There was an ice storm, right before we moved. It was a pretty bad one that took out electricity. 

• The apartment forgot we were moving in. Avana Soco has beautiful apartments, but they suck. We had to reschedule movers twice and stick up for ourselves, so they didn't cram us into an apartment we didn't want. It was such a hassle and way too much stress. We did get some brand-new appliances and didn't have to pay for them either ^_^

• We fully moved in and now feel so much happier. 

• I got into graduate school at UT Austin! And then into the School Librarianship Program. 

• The summer semester started while I was finishing teaching, but now I'm free and back to learning.