Almost back in the swing of things

Curriculum Planning - Sub teaching - IRS Victory!

With the South American school vacation drawing to a close at the end of this month, I'm back to work, in more ways than one.

The biggest thing is I am working on new curriculum mapping for our IB Business Program. We are tinkering with how we develop some of the information for the students through the three years of the program. In the past it hasn't been that big of a problem because I taught all of the business classes. However with our student population I'm only going to be teaching the Juniors and Seniors, while someone, currently unidentified person will be teaching Sophomores. With another teacher in the mix, expecially one with (presumably) less experience than I, I am trying to make their transition smooth, with lots of materials available to help them get a handle on it.

I was also in the classroom today. Lisa has been having some back problems and couldn't make it today. When she called in early today Celia, her school's jefe in charge of getting subs, asked if I could fill in. So I ended up going from lounging about lazily to hastily scrambling to get ready. I taught two English Lit classes, Seniors for Hamlet to start. They were covering Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be..." Bad mistake to have a history geek and sometime actor like me running this class. I think they will be begging for Mrs Evans to come back soon! Then it was going over a Hawthorne short story for Lisa's Junior class.

While at her school I collected her mail and behold! A Check. We have been in a running battle with the IRS since 2005. We filed, but I made a small mistake. The IRS caught the mistake but misapplied some numbers to the wrong category and - whooop! the IRS said we owed them $50,000. What? It went so far as one time they siezed money out of a bank account to pay the "collection." Eventually we got through the taxpayer advocate department and finally the IRS understood the problem. The case is now closed and we received a nice check, returning the seized money with interest. Hey! The little guy can win! Of course it took several hundred hours and five years to get it fixed, but it happened. Now I can pay some bills!