Completely lost track of time tonight; I had my club kids after school, one didn’t get picked up for forever, and then I think I melted in my chair for a little while, maybe? Either way, whatever I had planned for tonight clearly isn’t happening because I plan on being thoroughly asleep in an hour. I’ve already decided I’m not teaching tomorrow, ILEARN review be damned; the kids are out of their minds and I’m exhausted so to hell with it. I’m going to pass out progress reports and tell them to get something done then hide under my desk for the rest of the day. The math test is next Tuesday and after that the school year gets a lot easier.
(Also, is $6400 for five weeks of four-hour days worth it? Yes, right? Obviously yes? I should definitely do summer school.)
It was sixty degrees outside last week, so naturally this morning I woke up to, depending on where I measured, between ten and eighteen inches of snow on my driveway and front lawn. The driveway was still so warm that once the sun came out it completely dried off; there’s not a spot of snow or ice on my driveway right now. Despite that, my mailbox is still annoyingly inaccessible; the battery on the blower died before I got to it and I never went back out after charging it. Hopefully the mailman forgives me tomorrow.
Anyway, I taught from home today for the first time in a few years. I haven’t missed it.
I’ve been weirdly jumpy and out of sorts all evening, for no clear reason. I’m pretty sure we’re going to have a regular school day tomorrow– it’s 7:30 and none of the nearby districts have so much as called a delay yet– so I probably ought to get on putting together some sort of lesson plan. Maybe then I’ll go to bed early; it feels super late for some reason and there’s no reason to sit around and kvetch all night.
The following sentences will seem contradictory, I think, but they are both true:
I am having the best/easiest/most fun year of teaching I have had in a very long time, and it may be that this is the clear winner in terms of my entire career by the time the end of May rolls around; and
I do not remember ever being as consistently exhausted as I have been for the last month or so. It’s 8:15. I’m going to bed. I’m regularly going to bed around 9:00 lately, and no amount of caffeine cuts through anything; I’m completely immune to the stuff by now.
Pitched in with some sports stuff after work, and didn’t get home until 7:30. Ate dinner and since then I’ve been staring. Clearly productive thought is not happening tonight so I’m gonna go to bed early.
That capital L was originally a typo, but I’m keeping it because it feels appropriate.
Tomorrow is my son’s fourteenth birthday, meaning that I left a building where I had been teaching 8th graders all day and came home to a house with four extra 8th graders in it. Tomorrow we are going to a local Renaissance festival, at his request.
I have officially had one of the best first weeks of school of my entire career, and am nervously waiting for the other shoe to drop. That said, if it’s coming today, it had better be fast, as I’m going to bed early as hell tonight.
My 23rd first day of school is in the history books. One of the better ones, I think. My 5th hour is probably going to develop into an issue but 5th hour is always an issue for some reason and there were some external reasons they might have been more nuts than usual today that I’m not going to get into.
Actually, hell, I might as well: we changed vendors for our school lunches this year, and to put it charitably there are some kinks to be worked out. Lunch took so long that 5th and 6th hour were about 18 minutes long each. Given the circumstances, the kids being nuts is something I’ll excuse.
But yeah. The switch in my head finally flipped, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow. Hooray!
Logically, I was last at work just a couple of months ago, so it has to be true that I know how to exist in a world where I do not have access to a three-hour afternoon nap every single day whether I want one or not. I just don’t remember how that’s supposed to work, and I spend what feels like a huge percentage of my mental effort every day avoiding taking a nap. I succumbed today– the boy had a few of his friends over to play D&D, and I positioned myself where I wasn’t in their way but I would potentially hear if there were issues that might benefit from fatherly intervention– and apparently staying awake for that was all I was capable of today.
I have what I refer to as the “danger spot” on the sectional in the living room, but my stationary chairs in the library rarely betray me. That was not the case today, unfortunately.
So 5:30 to 8:00 just sorta vanished, and now I’m sitting here trying to remember if I had anything I needed or wanted to do this evening, and I don’t think there was, but … damn.
Forgive me a piece of drive-by literary criticism, but I’m rereading The Eye of the World again, with the end goal of eventually finally fucking finishing The Wheel of Time, and I don’t think it’s ever quite hit me just how comprehensive a rip-off the first fifteen chapters or so are of the Hobbiton-to-Bree portion of The Fellowship of the Ring, to the point where I halfway feel like Jordan had a copy of the book sitting next to him while he was writing to make sure he hit all the important bits. I’m still half-asleep and don’t really want to go point-by-point, but Christ, the number of commonalities are nuts.
