In Which Our Heroine Survives a Stressful Day

My day started about 3 am when I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep.  I started worrying about how I was going to accomplish everything I needed to accomplish, and I couldn't turn my mind off.  I was also concerned about a tricky meeting I had first thing, and due to somebody's else's poor planning, I wasn't ready for my social studies classes for the day.

I arrived at school at 6:30 am carrying 6 doz mini muffins, 2 pumpkin breads, 2 gallons of cider, and my usual lunch box, water bottle, Ipad, and bag.  Do I make 2 trips from my car, up the stairs to my room?  Of course not!  I made it successfully to my room and plopped everything down.  All the way to school, I'd been trying to come up with an activity for social studies, and finally made a decision.  I went to make some copies, and the copier had been turned off which means an almost 20 minute wait for it to warm up.  Meanwhile at 6:45 am I had to meet with a teacher from another school about a possible grievance.  (I am the grievance chair for our educational association.)  The teacher was extremely upset and I had to try to get as much info from the teacher as I could, give the teacher some advice, and decide what the next steps were.  That meeting lasted till 7:15 and then I had to go out to bus duty, making sure the stuff I needed copied had gotten copied.  Classes started at 7:30 and the teaching part of my day began.

The reason for the breakfast goodies was because today was my first "Breakfast with Books" day.  My kids are required to read 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week.  They keep journals, and instead of doing traditional book reports, they write weekly letters to me about their books.   About every 6 weeks, they are required to do a book talk.  So today was their first book talk.  We arranged our chairs into a circle, and then each student presented their talk.  I gave everyone a chance to ask a question, and kids got excited when they realized someone else had read a book they liked.  After everyone had shared, they had a chance to munch and sip on cider.  During the 2nd period class where I did the same thing, the principal came in to see what was happening, and he got into the act and shared a book he liked.

The day continued -- social studies was a bit looser than I like, a fire drill, but we finally got to the end of core classes.  We were scheduled to have an assembly at the end of the day. To make a long story short, the planned assembly didn't happen, and the principal shot from his hip to fill the time.  The whole school ended with 40 minutes of recess on a pretty chilly afternoon.  And then I had afternoon bus duty.  By the time I got back to my classroom it was 2:30 and I had exactly 1 hour 45 minutes to grade 42 timelines, 15 vocab assignments, 5 miscellaneous ELA papers, and 42 sets of social studies questions,  bring my grades up to date on the computer, and do my report cards!  I left my classroom at 3:55 (and left it quite a mess!) with all of that done and headed to a 4:00 meeting at church.  I had called the meeting so it would not have been good for me not to show!  Fortunately, it was an easy meeting - we are working on revising our by-laws, and I was home at 5:00.  Dinner was on the table at 5:30.   And now . . . .I am done!