The ugly, the bad, and the good. In that order.

I had one-of-the-worst-turned-one-of-the-best days at work today. The 3rd grade had our state testing (hooray for No Child Left Behind!) in math on Wednesday and Thursday, thus finishing all of that awful testing for the year. It's been a long, long road, and we've been getting ready since late fall first for the language arts testing in March, and now math. My kids have had it. The tests are exhausting. They feel a lot of pressure from me because I feel a lot of pressure from the math lead, and from the principal, who's feeling a lot of pressure from the superintendent. It's not a fun time to teach in an urban school district that's not meeting the NCLB standards. One of my kids cried during the test yesterday. It wasn't fun.

So today they were just a mess as a whole. It was absolutely ugly this morning. They're normally a pretty well behaved group, but they were so rude and so disrespectful, just yelling out inappropriate comments or talking while I was teaching. In the middle of literacy I tried to do the math to figure out how many more hours I have with them until the end of school.

But then this afternoon (after we sat on the wall and missed 5 minutes of recess because we were rude and disrespectful to Ms. G.), the 3rd graders were treated to 5 extra minutes of recess, a popsicle party, and then thirty extra minutes of recess. My kids were SO happy, and so grateful to have a popsicle and stay outside on a gorgeous afternoon. They chatted with me and I heard which Pokemon character was Y.'s favorite, the fact that E.'s dog is a beagle named Rocky (I've heard this story at least 5 times now), and that R.'s abuela (grandmother) had just three haircuts in her life.

And then we played. I joined a game with a bunch of other 3rd graders. It was this weird version of catch with 2 teams, but you try to throw the ball so the other team can't catch it (it took 5 minutes of me tossing it to kids on the other team until someone from my team finally told me that you didn't want the other team to catch it). My kids think I'm ancient and found it hysterical that I was running and jumping and throwing a ball. One asked me if I was embarrassed. Uh, should I have been? I made a particularly good throw and all of my girls came over to high-five me.

At 12:30, I reluctantly took them in, as we had been outside for 50 minutes already. I whined that I didn't want to go in. It was so much fun actually playing with my kids. I figured the afternoon would be a disaster since they had just spent the better part of 30 minutes eating popsicles and running wild with their teacher. I was instantly regretting my offer to the Spanish teacher to teach my writing lesson to both classes (that's 46 kids in all). But, I got all 46 (hot, sweaty, somewhat smelly) 3rd graders on the rug and interested in a lesson about writing memoirs, and had a fantastic afternoon as well!

Which was good, because my outlook on 40 more years in this job was looking pretty dismal this morning.