Dear Family,
I had the most lovely holiday, and I certainly thought that such a long and enjoyable break would leave me desperate to write a famlet. But I have to say, there’s nothing that kills my motivation to do anything more graduating from college.
That is right—I’m all finished! As of December 5th, I have no more obligations to Brigham Young University before they deign to gift me the degree that my family has spent the last several years paying them for.
Well, I suppose I should say, as of January 5th. I got an email during Christmas break that explained that I actually wasn’t set to graduate because of a deficiency on my transcript. Intrigued? I’m not sure if that’s the word I’d use to describe what I felt when I read the email, but it’s perhaps more positive and accurate.
Luckily, it was an easy fix. The problem was that I once had aspirations to acquire a Russian language certificate (since the college wouldn’t allow me to receive a minor, for reasons I consider similarly stupid to the reason I couldn’t graduate for a few days), but, perhaps a year ago, someone never got back to me about my application and I decided that I didn’t care enough to go through all the hoops my department head had suggested. And besides, I didn’t really know who to email, and who is ever going to ask to see my Russian language certificate anyway?
I’m not super proud of how I just let that aspiration disappear at the first bureaucratic obstacle, but it was a choice that is honestly quite representative of my larger personality. I enjoy conserving my energy for the things I consider absolutely necessary. Like making dinner or cleaning the bathroom.
Anyway, someone evidently did get my application, though they decided to never respond to it, since the certificate showed up on my transcript as incomplete. So, even though I applied to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in English Teaching, I could not graduate because of the deficiencies in my Russian language certificate.
Some nice women emailed me about this discrepancy in early January and told me that I had until January 22nd to either email all the right people and possibly take steps to earn the certificate in the next twenty days, or I could tell them that I wanted the certificate removed.
You can probably guess which option I chose.
I did briefly entertain the idea of finally earning my Russian certificate, but after one fruitless phone call and an email draft that I completed a quarter of, I gave up and told the nice BYU women to axe it.
So, yay, I will be graduating from BYU as scheduled! The whole experience was not terribly stressful, but it irked me. It reminded me of when I almost didn’t graduate from high school in 2020 due to a similar miscommunication. (Luckily, high school counselors are trained to assume student incompetence (I’m guessing), and so she fixed the problem all on her own before telling me there had ever been a chance that I might not graduate because of a few miscommunications about my concurrent enrollment classes.)
All’s well that end’s well, and this December ended up including several important milestones for me and Luke. The conclusion of my student teaching, our graduation, our first Christmas as a married couple, and our first wedding anniversary happened this month, followed shortly by our first full-time jobs after college.
You may be thinking that the conclusion of my student teaching is the same thing as my graduation, but I consider them to be completely separate. December 5th was my last day as a teacher at Provo High School, and I was sad to leave. It felt so odd to have a significant ending on an otherwise completely ordinary Friday in the middle of the school year for all of my students and colleagues.
My students were kind. I said my goodbyes and several said they would miss me and wished me well. My seniors were pretty unsentimental overall (with the exception of a few who either wrote me a card or wrote their first name on a button and gave it to me—that kid was always an exciting character in class), but my fourth period sophomores made me a cake!
I was certainly a little startled by the picture on it, but I suppose it’s not so hard to find a Wonnacott or a Willis whose facebook page has my wedding photos publicly available. I feel like if she had found and explored the Famlet, I would have heard more about it.
I didn’t cry, partially because I knew my time grading these students’ late assignments and papers wouldn’t be finished for another few days, but I did feel a great sense of loss leaving these people behind.
I really loved them, and I still miss them sometimes.
Luke finished his final classes a few weeks later, leaving us both fully graduated1! Luke was especially grateful to finish finals, probably because his wife had already been enjoying the lazy life for a few weeks by the time he was studying for exams, and he was still working forty hour weeks while preparing for his exams.
Of course, Luke wasn’t terribly concerned about performing well in his classes, which is something I had to come to terms with. As someone who has always been motivated to achieve high grades, it was at first difficult for me to grasp that Luke in his senior year wanted nothing more than to graduate. I won’t disclose his exact GPA (partially because I don’t actually remember it), but it…well, it was a passing GPA, and we are thrilled because of it.
With school done, we were able to go to Maryland for a solid two and a half weeks, visiting both the Willises and the Wonnacotts. Having both families within half an hour of each other is very convenient for planning holidays, though I will say that I was quite stressed during the week because of a self-imposed need to split time perfectly fairly between the two families.
We did so many fun and exciting things: we saw The Nutcracker, went to the National Zoo, participated in the Messiah sing along at the Kennedy Center, celebrated Christmas Eve with my extended family, celebrated Christmas as a joint Willis/Wonnacott event, and did a bunch of other wonderful things.
I feel so blessed to have two families that get along so well and are so willing to spend time with Luke and me and with each other. They were both always happy to have us along, and always willing to relinquish our time to the other family when requested.
Both families were also very willing to give me and Luke up to celebrate our next milestone: our first wedding anniversary.
I have to say that our first year of marriage has been wonderful. I don’t feel like there’s anything to complain about, except for perhaps the weirdness that being married seems to bring to some friendships. But I won’t go into that. You probably know what I’m talking about.
We are lucky to have an anniversary on a day that we’ll probably always be able to guarantee for ourselves, and we happily to celebrate in Maryland(ish). Luke came up with the idea to stay in an airbnb in Harper’s Ferry (technically in West Virginia), the location of our very first date about two and a half years ago2.
Our plan was to get to the airbnb, put our stuff down, and then go for a walk around Harper’s Ferry or do the Maryland Heights hike that we did on our first date.
We ended up doing neither of these things because it was gloomy and cold.
Instead, we drove to Aldi, purchased some charcoal, small steaks, bell peppers, and onions, and made ourselves a nice dinner on the charcoal grill.
You should know that this was Luke’s idea, and, like many ideas of his, it felt unappealing to me while I was contemplating the relative convenience of stopping by a restaurant, but resulted in a lovely meal and an enjoyable evening spent cooking together.
After another week or so in Maryland, Luke and I flew back to Utah. Our flight to Salt Lake, which was supposed to get in around 9 PM, but ended up landing instead at 1 AM.
It was actually quite amusing. We boarded the plane on schedule, probably started our taxi a few minutes late, and then sat in the middle of a runway for what felt like twenty minutes. At some point, the pilot sheepishly admitted over the intercom that, because of some completely mundane complication, he was going to try to do something totally legitimate and trustworthy to get the left engine to boot up the right engine. “It’s a real thing,” he explained over the airplane speakers, “but I don’t think you really want me to explain it all to you.”
It turned out, no matter how reassuring those words were, the pilot could not complete the totally legitimate engine-hijacking routine, which, who knows, might be a blessing in disguise.
He tried two times (that he informed us of), apparently failed both times, and turned the plane around to take us back to our gate.
I’m not quite sure whether it’s worse to board the plane and then be deplaned, or to just wait endlessly at your gate while your departure time moves further and further back, but I found myself surprisingly entertained by the whole ordeal. One boon was the presence of an old friend, Mariann Higgins, whom I hadn’t seen for years before catching up with her before the flight we took to Maryland at the end of December. We chatted even more during the hours spent waiting for United to get us into the air, and she was a mine of helpful, delayed-flight optimism.
She shared stories of her brother’s experience being offered a thousand dollars to take a different flight3, as well as informed us that if our flight was delayed three hours, the airline had to provide us with some kind of food in the form of a voucher or snacks. We got both, and so Luke and I treated ourselves to some airport Chick-fil-A, as well as Pringles from the snack cart (something I have never been offered on an airplane, mind you).
Eventually, the gate agents informed us that they “found” another jet—another piece of airplane reassurance that could be concerning if you think about it too much—and we took off with no problems.
The glorious Hannah Willis, who had agreed to pick us up from the airport, never complained about the arrival time getting later and later. When we got into the car, she handed us a tote bag full of snacks and seemed as chipper as ever.
She is, without a doubt, my favorite chaffeur.
And so, back at home now, Luke and I have totally adopted our happiest, full-time, DINK lifestyle.
“DINK,” for those who may not know, refers to a couple with “Dual Income, No Kids,” and we’ve technically been DINKs for a while now. However, having dual income when both individuals are out of college and salaried is way different from the alternative.
And as Luke and I now both work full time, me at a school and Luke continuing to work at PROFi (full time, as he has been for the last six months or so), we’ve both found ourselves reveling in the free evenings that accompany working college graduates.
At this point, we have no idea what to do with our time or our money. Luke did force me to buy one treat for myself at Sam’s Club the other day, and I came home with a huge bag of NERDS Gummy Clusters4. So we’re slowly figuring it out.
It’s odd to me how motivated I can be to do all sorts of things when I’m not being paid but am instead being graded to do something. Now that I’m being paid, I am far less inclined to take work home or, in fact, do anything besides the most necessary productive things once the work day ends.
I am beginning to get sick of this, and so writing this famlet is one of a few early steps in my attempt to resurrect my ability to self-motivate. Hopefully more on that next month.
The school that employs me is a public charter elementary school in Draper, and my position is not as an English teacher but instead as a sort of teacher’s assistant. I make copies, grade, and recently began teaching a small group of sixteen students a reading comprehension class every day. It’s all of the least stressful parts of teaching, since I have to do hardly any planning.
However, the school is not exactly what I expected, and I go back and forth on whether I would send my hypothetical kid there.
To explain why, let’s learn a little bit about my hypothetical kid. We’ll call him Toby.
Toby, given my desire to avoid operant conditioning in my attempts to discipline him, may end up not super disciplined—who knows. That’s obviously not the goal, but I really just have a hard time picturing myself offering routine enough punishments or rewards to do it particularly effectively anyway. As you may have picked up in previous letters, my goal is to discipline my children through emotional connections and conversations.
My books say it works.
Anyway, my time at this new job has simultaneously reinforced (an ironically behaviorist term) and challenged this goal, because I have unwittingly found myself at the Mecca of operant conditioning in elementary education. We have standardized reward systems across all classrooms, standard punishments in the form of “card moves”5 (where students move their card to a slot to match their corresponding transgression, whether it was forgetting their homework, disrupting class, or being “disrespectful.” I’ve never seen anyone get that last card move, but my impression is that the world may collapse if such a behavior ever occurred.), and a general “no nonsense” approach to walking in the hallways.
It’s hard to know whether Toby would be really confused coming to a school like this, or if he’d become addicted to praise in just the way his teachers desire him to.
OR perhaps Toby would become one of the rebellious students at school because he will have transcended the need for such trivial things as rewards. Honestly, I think I’d be a little too proud if that were the case, which is a feeling I can only attribute to my own immature refusal to subscribe to the idea that kids who sit quietly and quickly follow directions without asking questions are inherently “good” kids. Though they are certainly the least annoying ones.
Just the other day, the teacher I work with reminded me that I’m not there to be friends with the students; I’m there to be stern and keep them accountable to the instructions she gives them and the unyielding school rules.
This is entirely true, and so I’ve been doing my best to be more stern, despite the fact that I never feel like I know where the line is when it comes to whispered conversations in the classroom or boisterous behavior during passing periods.
I realize, reading over these last few paragraphs, that I seem to be scoffing at everything this school stands for, though I honestly think that if any public elementary school had the funds this charter school has, it would choose similar approaches. And I must admit that the students in that school are some of the most respectful and accountable kids I’ve ever seen…even the kids who get at least two card moves every single day.
So really, I’m sure Toby would be perfectly happy there, and they’d probably give him some really excellent habits. He would just have a mother who doesn’t care what card moves she has to sign off on each night and would be sad about how much homework he has each night.
Ideally, we’ll be raising Toby far away from Utah, so I won’t ever have to confront my hypocritical and irrational feelings about the pedagogical approach of the school I currently work at.
I’m grateful to have a full-time job; I’m grateful to work with people who care about the success of the children they work with; I’m grateful for the children who show a lot of promise as disciplined and empathetic individuals.
I just have a silly prejudice against rewards and punishments—probably because I’m not good at giving either of them.
Anyway, Luke’s job brings him consistent happiness and a seeming lack of conflicted feelings about the philosophies followed there. In light of his recent graduation, his bosses promoted him from “Associate Financial Advisor” to “Financial Advisor” and “Team Lead.” So, while his responsibilities don’t seem to have changed much over the last month, he now earns a salary and gets PTO.
I suppose I also have both of those things now, but the numbers for each are much higher on his end.
His role as team lead seems to be going well, though I’m not sure how prestigious it is at a company comprised of six people, two of whom are his employers. Regardless, by all reports, he does well in his responsibilities and his bosses seem to trust him with a lot of responsibility and decisions.
Luke seems really happy and busy, which is wonderful.
We’re grateful for his generous, kind, and capable employers.
We are both trying to regain our motivation to use our evenings productively, or at least in a way that does not involve rotting in front of a television. But rotting on the couch, despite the unpleasantness of the word choice, is just so enjoyable sometimes.
Fortunately, our weekends tend to be productive, and we made a quick trip to St. George just this past weekend to visit Luke’s paternal grandparents. We had a ward temple trip on Friday night, which we organized and consequently felt obligated (and blessed) to attend. So we arrived in St. George at around midnight on Friday night, and spent a lovely Saturday with grandparents before driving back home at 6:30 AM on Sunday in order to make it to ward council.
I love visit members of my and Luke’s families. His grandparents are some of the kindest people, and it’s always a pleasure to spend time with them. Three and a half hours each way is really not such a big sacrifice to get there, especially when the total seven hours are seven hours that we wouldn’t have used in a particularly interesting way anyway.
One final thing I’m grateful: I’m grateful for my generous, impulsive husband.
On our drive back from St. George, he learned about a march in Salt Lake to protest ICE and decided with an unwavering resolve that he wanted to go. I, despite my father’s lack of surprise in his letter that I would attend such an event, did not want to go and did not want Luke to go.
I think my aversion stemmed not from a hesitance to voice dissent against ICE, but out of fear due to the inspiration behind the protests. You probably know about the unjust and unnecessary shootings that have sparked a lot of the current protesting against the current method of immigration enforcement. On the entire drive home, I couldn’t shake the feelings and images in my head of something terrible happening to Luke at this protest.
If I hadn’t been the one driving, I might have started looking at flights to Maryland so I could move back in with my parents, which is where I have now decided I would go if my husband suddenly died (yes—morbid, but practical). For whatever reason, I was in full disaster mode.
And yet, I knew that going to the protest was a good thing to do, if for no other effect than to feel like I was contributing something to my community and participating in an action that demonstrated acceptance, while so many publicized acts have done the opposite recently.
And still, Luke practically had to drag me to Salt Lake as soon as we got out of church.
And as much as I had been dreading the idea, as soon as we were driving to Salt Lake, I was in.
Luke had already stopped by Sam’s Club to pick up water bottles and granola bars, which we handed out to other protestors before the marching began. This was a social situation that I did not anticipate being as pleasant as it turned out to be.
Most people turned us down, but we gave out all of our waters and snacks. Those who rejected the offerings had wide smiles and thanked us, or, in the case of one man, said, “I’m good, Dad, thanks,” which made me laugh.
Luke and I generally have different motivations for inserting ourselves into the discussion surrounding ICE. Or it may be better to say that our disgust with the organization has varying impetuses. I try not to make light of his reasons, and he tries not to make light of mine, and, ultimately, I’m grateful that we went on Sunday.
I never really thought that I would find myself in the same political march as my libertarian husband, but I’m really grateful that he was the one dragging me to a protest for a cause that I can fully support.
I try to be a good neighbor, and I’d like to be a less passive one. I think Luke and I both feel that way.
Let us know if you can think of any other ways that we can be good neighbors, or good to you.
We’re happy, we’re blessed, and we love you all.
Love,
Sophie
- I keep saying we’ve “graduated.” We’re both still waiting for our diplomas in the mail and won’t be walking until the end of April. ↩︎
- Luke pointed out as I clarified this number with him that, “It’s weird that we’ve known each other for two and a half years,” which I must admit, sounds way worse than, “We’ve been married for one year.” ↩︎
- Hearing about how airlines intentionally overbook flights, expecting someone to cancel or not make it, just angers me. ↩︎
- It was $1 off 😉 ↩︎
- Part of inflicting the punishment that is the “card move” involves memorizing which discouraged behavior pairs with which number card. Today, I made the embarrassing mistake of threatening a “seven” for all the students who were talking over me. My students kindly reminded me that what I meant was an “eight,” as sevens indicated a failure to bring completed homework to class, while eights signify a failure to follow directions. I then joked that I would give them all elevens for correcting me, which, as you may be able to guess, do not exist. And they laughed (which I probably shouldn’t have made them do, as I was supposed to be disappointed in them). It really can be fun learning to speak a new language. ↩︎
Senior Contributor to The Famlet Monthly