Shopping

I really like shopping.  I'm pretty good at it, too.  This probably accounts for the slight discrepancy between what I thought I had in the checking account to pay the bills this month and what is actually in the checking account to pay the bills this month, now that I think of it...

Anyway, shopping is good.  It makes me happy.  I do not, however, like workshopping.  By this, I do not mean shopping for work stuff.  That's not so bad.  You get to buy a new thermos and shoes.   No, I am referring to Teacher Workshop Day.  It's the day where all the teachers get to sit and listen to endless rounds of presentations and are expected to process more information than any living human being can really absorb in the amount of time given.  

Today we had workshops on the test scores earned by the students last year.  We had workshops on record keeping and privacy rights.  We had workshops on scheduling.  We had workshops on food allergies.  We had workshops on where to post the fire drill information.   We had workshops on assessment, staff development opportunities and how the Teacher's Union is working to protect our rights under the contract.  

And, in a final ironic twist, we had a workshop on incorporating reading and writing across the curriculum where we were chastised because the committee's classroom observations last year showed that we tend to talk too much when presenting information...

My picture was taken for the school bulletin board, my staff laptop was issued and I was assigned a code which will allow me to activate the photocopiers.  (I get 5000 copies before it runs out...pretty sweet!)  I was gifted with a school t-shirt and someone is thinking about getting me a key to my classroom sometime before the holiday break in December.  The administrators provided me with takeout pizza for lunch as a Welcome Back To School prize, but I opted out of that one.  The staff meeting ran a bit long and I couldn't help but think about how much bacteria was congealing on the boxed offerings while we sat helplessly in the cafeteria enmeshed in a raging debate over whether or not it would be best for the 7th graders to meet in the cafeteria instead of the 8th graders tomorrow morning.  

I ate my string cheese and felt all the better for it.  Except that, by 3:00, I had a headache of raging proportions.  That may also have been due to the fact that the servers were down and I was left with no way to email the Special Ed. director to tell her that there has been a mistake on my caseload.  It's the same mistake that I warned her to watch out for last spring because it would be a disaster if this kid ended up on my caseload.  She swore to me that this would not happen.  I believe that she swore this to me twice.  She looked super sincere while she was doing the swearing and I had no reason to believe that she was a fakey-fake swearer. 

But she is...

Frankly, I think that I've put in enough time this week towards the whole teaching thing.  I believe I should take the rest of the week off.  I'll try again on Monday after I've rested up from all the "shopping."

There was a moment of despair early in the day.  It was the moment where I realized that it was going to be a long day of sitting and listening to Very Important Information That I Must Not Ever Forget Lest I End a School Day With A Kid In Anaphylactic Shock And No Idea How To Assess His Reading Progress Before The Ambulance Arrives.  I failed to see how I was going to make it through 8 hours of this.  In desperation, I peeked into my purse.  Perhaps I'd left a nice hard candy in there or some Cyanide...

It was better.  Way down deep in the depths of my Absurdly Gi-normous purse, nestled in amongst the candy wrappers that I hide in there and promise I'll throw away later I found that most blessed of things:  A sock in progress.  It seems that I never took out the one that I brought with me that time I was waiting to get the new tires put on the car.

I still can't remember what tests I'm supposed to have given by the end of the month.  And I'm only half certain of where the epi-pens are kept for the kids with food allergies.  But a nice sock makes it rather bearable.  

Tomorrow, we start with the kids.  It promises to be a chaotic sort of day and one where there will be any number of scheduling errors.  The sock is coming with me.  I probably won't have time to knit on it...

But I like knowing it's there.

SA