Half of these three months of summer has gone by quite quickly. The first day of school still seems very far away, although I'm sure I'll be panicking and waking up at 3 AM with classroom nightmares once August officially rolls around. However, these quiet days are nice too: reading, watching movies, art camp teaching, road trips, a short weekend trip for a good friend's baby shower, weddings, planning water games, crafting, cooking, challenging my non-existent engineering skills my brother is deluded that I have by sending me a 3D "assembly required" model of the Eiffel Tower. Even the deep, dark hole that the death of my rabbit left has begun to fill in a little bit - volunteering at my local rabbit shelter helps.

Thinking a lot about the BTSA. My school district calls it by something else, partially because they do it a little differently. Instead of a fellow teacher at my own school being my mentor, I'll have an experienced teacher who's sole job is to observe, critic, and give me wake up calls from complacency. Which is nice. Because even the most veteran of teachers will find their attentions torn with the work load of their own classroom as well as a needy n00bie like me.

The mentor is shared among all the other BTSA program inductees, but there won't be more than a handful of us - mostly math teachers - because I know for a fact from an HR clerk that my district hasn't hired anyone new in at least five years.

Hold up. FIVE YEARS? And no new teacher hires? That's the norm for this past year, and perhaps the previous one too in certain areas. But five? I'm shocked at the implications this little statistic holds, and I'm ever more awed at just how lucky I got.