Need to come to terms with something potentially very heartbreaking...

Hello! It has been a very long time, and I know many of us care for one another-- and have helped one another immensely over the years. Today, I believe my beloved domain name of 8 years, teachingvision.org, was taken-- it is entirely written in Japanese right now, and it looks like someone registered a Wordpress weblog on it today. Right now, if everything cannot be recovered as it was, I am crushed. Always, I am determined to rebuild-- and rebuild-- BETTER, but my mind is clouded and I do not know where to begin. If this has happened, I am devastated and crushed because it was something that came from my heart.

It has been a very busy school year. I am finally getting my gifted endorsement after many years of dreaming about it-- and I have been blogging for Scholastic.com about their e-Reader program, Scholastic Storia. This has also been a year for me trying some tremendous new experiments, the greatest success being the dissection of cow eyeballs (as you see below). I began a new club at our school called the "Adventure Club" as well-- which was something that the advanced fifth-grade teacher and I began for the past four years, where we explored two colleges, the University of Florida and University of South Florida. I was not able to do that this past year, but this year, I get to bring students to both. We already traveled to Orlando for our EPCOT field trip, which is a phenomenal learning experience, too.

I told everyone I am my school's Teacher of the Year, also! This coming Friday, January 25th, the district Teacher of the Year will be announced. I have felt honored to represent my school and have sensational individuals share the honor-- the finalists have tremendous hearts and are so friendly. I cannot wait until the end of this next week to see who the interviewing panel has chosen.

In light of teachingvision.org again, I cannot believe how many people have visited the website in eight years-- nearly 300,000. I never thought one person's efforts during the summers would affect so many people (and their classrooms). Thank you for all you have done to support me so far-- and I promise, I will not let you down in the least if I have to rebuild it all. It was not a small website at all, but nothing's impossible. You all "fuel my fire" and propel me to "be my best"!