My day was too crappy to talk about.
But I read this lovely post on my bus ride home. Wow. What a beautiful eulogy.

Knit with this yarn!!

Never take a class while you are also full-time teaching (or full-time anything probably!). For a while I had a great system going on, Friday afternoon into evening finish lesson plans for the next week, Saturday morning do all my reading and writing for my Wednesday night class, then move on to grading, blah blah blah etc.
Oh except for how I’m trying to catch up on grades so I COMPLETELY FORGOT that I have this class I have to do homework for and now uh oh my class is tomorrow night and I have 50 pages of reading to do (and a response to write afterward). Oh and I have to interview someone in the BIL program at my school for the paper I have due next week and actually I was supposed to interview her this morning AND I FORGOT because OMG I cannot keep anything together in my personal life right now!
I never know the date, I just know “tomorrow is X day on this set of lesson plans, do I have everything I need? Yup, OK” and move on. So I missed a concert I had tickets to (couldn’t have spared the time to go anyway), I just paid three bills late (OMG WHUT) not because I didn’t have the money but because I just put them in a pile and then FORGOT THEY EXISTED, and now I’ve just gotten my apartment tidied up and I must go do all my own homework before *hopefully* getting more of my students’ work graded although let’s be serious, that’s extremely unlikely to happen tonight.
Where is the personal assistant to keep my own life on track? All I can keep track of is my school stuff (and given that I’m so far behind on grading, how much track am I keeping of that anyway!), everything else is just falling to the wayside. (Does this happen every year? Maybe. But I do think changing to a new grade level has knocked some of my fourth-year teacher stability off its rack.)

I watched a very fun movie while I cooked, washed dishes, and graded last night: Life Partners (streaming on Netflix). It wasn’t an amazingly great movie or an award-winner or a blow your mind movie–but it was a sweet lovely movie about friendships and how to nurture and maintain them and how to repair them when they blow up. It reminded me mood-wise a lot of Imagine Me & You, a dearly loved flick in this house.
I started a great book today: “The Glass Sentence” by S.E. Grove, which so far is pretty spectacular. It all takes place in a different version of our world, a version where there was some sort of disruption that ripped time out of balance and now different parts of the world are in different times. For example, the time the heroine lives in 1891 and has 20-hour days/clocks. Another area is stuck in 1700. There are all kinds of super cool images and ideas in here (the mental maps are SO COOL!). It’s very much about map making and adventure while at the same time it’s about rejecting the “other” and jingoism and immigration and all kinds of issues I’ve been trying to talk with my kiddos (aka students) this year.
I had a rootbeer float tonight with a hastily gulped down Chicken Betty (sandwich) at the world’s tiniest M. Burger when I tried to go to my acupuncture appointment but it turned out my acupuncturist had left early with a family emergency. Sigh. So I’m no less stressed than I was earlier but my float was delicious.
So there you, go: a movie, a book, and go get yourself a root beer float and I feel I’ve added a lot of possibilities to your life this evening. What more could you want? 🙂 #heh
Also, here, this picture:

Good night!

So I’ll probably fall off the wagon on day 2 or 3 but right now I’m claiming I’m going to blog every day in November. What do I have to tell you, my pretties? Well, let’s see. I’m teaching 7th grade and MAN ALIVE it is a tough grade, maybe even moreso after having been teaching 5th graders for two years. I’m used to having one or two students in the room whose goal it is to out sass, out speak, and out anything me, not ALL OF THEM. I’m teaching social studies and writing which has also involved some adjustments as I actually need them to learn specific social studies content (esp as 7th graders in Illinois have to take the constitution test and they cannot graduate from 8th grade unless they’ve passed it) versus just learning to become better readers, although surely they should ALSO be learning to be better readers in my room, not just with their reading teacher. I spent too many weekends getting not enough done and now we are entering week 9 of the 10-week quarter and I’m SO behind on grading so instead of getting to have a single weekend day for my own solitary self as I usually try to do, this is the second weekend in a row that I have spent the entire day Saturday grading, as well as my usual Sunday of doing at least 75% school stuff like preparing all my materials for the week and gathering up all my loose “Oh this might be a fun supplement for that” ideas. I was at work until 6 pm every night this (past) week except Wednesday…when I was at school and didn’t get home until 9 anyway. I’m tired, people. Very very tired.
That said, I have gotten more positive feedback in two months at this school than in three years at my last one and gee doesn’t that tell you something about the toxic environment I left behind (and not of my own choosing, but definitely of my own thanking now looking back). I am back to a public transit hour-long commute so I have been doing a TON of reading, OMG does it ever feel good to have my reading time back, even if I have lost all my gym time right now with being so overwhelmed at school and in life.
And that is all for now. More tomorrow, supposedly. We’ll see. 😉