Last week, my friend Grant was blessed to get a job in Knoxville, and I am very thankful that the Lord blessed him with work here in East TN. This past Friday, some of us got together at the church to play games and sing hymns. There were only 8 of us that were able to meet up because this meet up wasn't scheduled till a couple of days beforehand. We sang from the 8 PBH hymnals that Jeff and I brought with us.

Saturday, Kara and I met up with Hannah, Grant, Reneé, Daniel, Jeff, and Emily and hiked up some trails at Frozen Head State Park. The water was really low - the lowest I've seen the water there at Frozen Head, but we still had fun. There is a waterfall that we usually hike over to see, but the waterfall wasn't much of a waterfall this past weekend.

The 2nd 9 weeks of the school year started yesterday. This means that I now have a new group of middle school students - my middle school classes rotate and change up every 9 weeks. So, I'm getting used to my new classes and am planning on combining the keyboarding and the MS Office lessons this 9 weeks. In years past, I have always split up the 9 weeks: the first half would be spent with MS Office and the second half would be spent practicing keyboarding skills. This 9 weeks, we are planning to do keyboarding every day for 15 minutes and learn about MS Office (6th grade - Word, 7th grade - PowerPoint, 8th grade, Excel) each day after keyboarding. I'm excited to see how well this works with my classes.

Yesterday, I had a rough time with my 7th grade class because many of the boys were being very disrespectful all at once. This class has a unique blend of student personalities and behaviors, but today went much better. As a consequence of yesterday, I created an assigned seating arrangement for the class, and after class today, I did keep one boy behind to talk to him about his behavior. Afterward, two other boys stepped in from the hallway and apologized to me about their behavior. I shook their hands and thanked them for their apology.

This past weekend, we replaced our Internet filter with Bsecure. We were using SafeEyes, but there were some aspects of that program that we didn't like. We tried a 2 week trial of the new Net Nanny Internet filter, but we didn't like it either. Bsecure used to be called Bsafe, and I had used Bsafe years ago and didn't like it. However, with their new updates, I am now convinced that this is the best Internet filter and the most user friendly that is available today. I would recommend downloading Bsecure if you do not yet have an Internet filter. You can even set up different accounts with different restrictions for different user accounts.