I'm monitoring testing....

I thought I'd blog while I'm watching 8th grade students take their annual achievement tests. OCA didn't have enough teachers to cover both the senior classes and the testing rooms, so they asked me to come over and help. You know how I love to be here. On Monday when I finished I went to finish the afternoon in 2nd grade. That class is the sweetest class with two darling boys and 10 sweet girls (They are the 1st graders that I took a photo of last winter with all their Bibles! They were very excited to have me in their room again. Maybe a litte too excited... The teacher is reading one of the American Girl books to them, one about Felicity. So this morning I brought Linnea's Felicity for them to see. Don't worry, Linnea, the teacher said she wasn't going to let them play with her!

Yesterday was dark, dark, dark. Those heavy dark, cold rainy days really bother me. I woke up with a headache, but it went away fairly soon. I wrote letters, read and tidied up the house. Since Andrew's car is broken, there was no car for me to go anywhere. Not like I really wanted to anyway in weather like that. However, by 4 it was an absolutely gorgeous day. After dinner Den, who had gotten new running shoes, and I went for a 3 mile walk along the bike path. The sun was just setting as we returned. Ah, I love Midwest evenings! There was no wind and the sky was clear and sunny. I DO love living here...except for no sea.

I'm reading a biography of Ben Carson called Gifted Hands. He is a neurosurgeon who separates Siamese twins. He is a brilliant man and a Christian. He talks about how his mother kept after him and his brother to work hard and do their best in everything. One amazing story takes place when he was in his first semester at Yale. He had done very well in high school and easily gotten into Yale, but he says that he really hadn't learned how to study. When it came time for his Chemistry final, he knew that he hadn't learned what he should and he was going to fail. Since he had wanted to be a doctor ever since he was 8 years old, he began to panic. That night he prayed and asked forgiveness for not working all semester like he should have. He prayed that God would help him study, then he worked and worked all the problems in the book. But by 1 am he was too tired and went to bed. During the night he had a dream about the test problems. He was working on them in his dream. When he woke up, he could remember what his dream was so he wrote down everything he could remember. When he got to the test, THOSE WERE THE EXACT QUESTIONS ON THE TEST! He wrote the test and ended up getting a 97. However, he never again procrastinated about studying. He knew then, for sure, that God wanted him to be a doctor.