2 down, 178 to go

So today was the second day of school, and it's great so far. With the exception of one boy and one girl who I think will drive me crazy by next week, my class is awesome. Someone even picked me flowers/weeds at recess this afternoon. My lessons have mostly been going well, and with the use of some minor threats, I managed to keep all 23 of them absolutely silent for five minutes as they waited in the hallway taking turns at the bathroom today. I've made a huge deal about how great it is to be in third grade because you're so grown up, and so they're all excited about the planners I gave them to write their homework in, and even about the fact that I'll be giving them homework every night and on weekends. Being 8 or 9 is just about the coolest thing ever.

The only little glitch in today was when I was collecting my class on the playground after recess, and all of a sudden my sandal broke. I felt just a wee bit unprofessional about the idea of walking around wearing only one shoe even in my own room, so I hobbled around for the next 3 hours trying to grip the sandal with my toes. It wasn't pretty. I tripped on the rug twice during my math lesson, which led to gasps from my suck-up table of girls and "Are you ok Ms. G???"


Even Miss America falls. At least I stayed on my feet.

Eats leaves and shoots

I can't stand when people older than 12 make silly grammar mistakes. At the top of my list is when people add an apostrophe when changing a word to plural form. But I also get irritated when people mix of your/you're, their/there, and its/it's.

On the other hand, I LOVE finding typos in published stuff that's supposedly edited, like books and things like that.

So, I found THIS pretty amazing. These guys are pretty cool, and one is from my old (and Obama's old) neighborhood!

This post isn't going to be interesting to anyone but me.

I've been very sad that summer is ending. It means getting back into a regular routine (for some reason I treated summer school as a pretend job--going to bed late a lot, and getting a little lazy about my teaching), and it also means the sad goodbye to warm weather and summer clothing. Today was my first day back at work, filled with new teacher orientation and training and meetings up until next week's first day of school. While I was getting ready this morning all I could think about was "Oh goddddddd how can summer be done??!?!" (I whined a lot in my head). And I wasn't excited about going back. But then I got there, and hadn't really thought about the fact that I'd see some friends at work who also got new positions over the summer, or the fact that there were a few new teachers at my school that I hadn't met yet. So it turned out to be a lot of fun! Plus, I'm kind of a sucker for corniness, as are many teachers. The superintendent of course realizes this and began his speech with some inspiring message and stories and quotations, and so now I'm all eager to get my students in the room and start changing the world.



But wait. The day gets even better. I decided to do a little bit of work in my classroom after the meetings, and when I got in I found that a brand new rug had been delivered to my room for meetings on the floor (and it's so clean and pretty...) and all of my classroom supplies had been delivered. I had a gigantic mess of brand new dry-erase markers and erasers, pencils, pink erasers, pens, crayons, staples, tape, and all that other fun stuff. Plus a big pile of 3rd grade composition notebooks (they're red!) and math workbooks (which smell amazing, like new workbooks do).

Clearly I've been on vacation for far too long if this is the kind of stuff that makes my day.

Mishmash

I haven't blogged in a long time (again) because I've had 80 thousand thoughts going through my head and couldn't decide what to write about, so I wrote about nothing. So, I decided it was time to get my thoughts out, only it's going to come as one big rambling mess right now.

Kerrin's wedding was this weekend. And it was weird, because it was Kerrin! Becoming a wife! And I've known her since we were 7, and I went to her 8th birthday party, which was a "tea party" theme and we had to come in our mom's dresses. Her wedding kind of felt like that--dressing up and pretending and having fun while doing both. But Kerrin looked amazing and the wedding was beautiful and my dress didn't fall down and expose everyone, so I'd consider it a success. Plus, I stayed away from beer all day (minus one in the limo from the church to reception), and I managed to drink steadily for almost 12 hours. I think I'm on to something.


I like this one because it looks like I'm a stunning 5'9". But Caitlin and I are actually the same height--I was just standing on a step with the other two.






Around hour 5 of drinking, a ride on the playground airplane was just about the greatest thing ever


In other news, I feel like I'm bipolar these days, or maybe have multiple personalities. I have different thoughts about my new job going through my head about 85% of the day lately. But I go back and forth between "Ohgod-ohgod-ohgod-ohgod-ohgod-ohgod-ohgod-ohgod" to "I think I can do this." But during the "Oh god" stretches, it's a pretty awful feeling. I keep thinking of stuff--some big, some little--that I hadn't even realized I had to do before the first day of school. Like, I should probably put the kids' birthdays up on a door in my room to make it look a little more homey because I'm keeping most of the bulletin boards naked for the beginning of school. And that's easy, but it'll take a little bit of time to write down 46 names and birthdays. Or a bigger project I realized is to sort through all of the books I'm putting in my classroom library and categorize them by content and difficulty. I'm not that familiar with a whole lot of 3rd grade chapter books, so that's going to take way more time than it should.


Finally, I'm so stressed out, and when I get stressed out I don't pick up after myself, which only makes me feel more stressed out.
In case you forgot, I did the same thing during the end of each semester of grad school, as seen below:



Now ordinarily I might make an effort to clean up a bit more so as not to make my roommate jump out the window, Swiffer in hand, but my roommate is off in China for the week. Just like the old pictures above, I've created piles all over the apartment. I've got a pile of books the principal left me about teaching English language learners, another pile with binders of the 3rd grade curriculum in my city, and piles of mail I need to sort through, plus a bag of veggies from my parents' garden, and stuff I haven't unpacked yet from this past weekend. It's a disaster. But I figure that Kate will be so tired from a week without pima, that she won't even notice until the middle of next week. Just as long as the piles don't creep down the stairs to her room.