[All_That_Chaz]

I stopped coming to ffr when ffya was giving me a more condensed dose of the community that I loved. When ffya kind of collapsed like a flan in a cupboard when we all realized we're like 30 and have careers and families, I followed suit and worked hard to become a teacher, which is what I had been working towards since 2009. Getting the coursework done was easy enough since I took advantage of cheap community college and local state schools. But when I started taking long term sub jobs I realized to get by I had to take on a second job tutoring in an after school program. Then I realized I needed a third job working at a tutoring center just to get by. So for a while I was working something like 12 hours a day Monday-Friday and 6 hours on Saturday and Sunday. I took my lumps in the sub teaching world. Getting set up as a fall guy by a district that was being monitored by the state. Being threatened by parents for snitching on a 15-year-old 7th grader trying to sell pot in my classroom. Getting assaulted by a 20-year-old senior in a rough school for having the audacity to ask him to return items he stole from me. Watching my pay get cut by 60% from one year to the next when the district went from hiring their long term subs directly to using a staffing company. But after a lot of struggling I made it into a full time teaching gig in January, 2015. I'm still there and working my way towards tenure, which should be mine around the start of the 2018-2019 school year. This year is probably the first since I started teaching that I can say I feel comfortable in how I go about my job. This is evidenced by even having the free time to post a thread on ffr.

This community really has meant the world to me. I have made and met about as many close friends in this community as I have outside of this community. I was so happy to be able to help the place out by taking care of profiles and forums for a while. And it killed me to not have this group to console, cheer on, and harass me that I got so used to for so long. So now I'm this 32-year-old math teacher and some of my most important relationships still originate on this silly website. Thanks for still being here.