Friday--thank god

Oy.

Remember how I slept ten hours on Wednesday night? Well, I was all prepared to continue to stay rested, so I went to bed on Thursday night at 10.15. What happened? Nothing.

No sleep. At all.

I'd felt awful all day long, and it got worse in the evening. The pressure, oh the pressure. Half my head felt like it was gonna implode, and I could hardly move a limb without nausea. Ugh. Today my mom validated me by saying, That was a migraine! That explains why neither the Sudafed nor Airborne had any effect whatsoever.

It was a waking nightmare, though, to be wide awake all.night.long. At about three-thirty, I pondered just getting up and having a leisurely morning at home and at the copier at school. (nerd!)

In about five minutes around 4.30, the pressure lifted, and the rest of my body was like, ahhh. I got to rest physically, if not sleep.

Somehow I made it through the day. I told my classes that I wasn't feeling well and couldn't raise my voice. Sure enough, they were very awesome, as always. I kind of love my kids for that--they're so damn well-behaved! I think I trained them well and set the tone right, because the math teacher is always telling me they're all squirrelly in her class, since they can't talk in my class. Sweet! Not for her, obviously, but dang--what I did worked!

We did a quick "mini-lesson" on sequencing. Mini-lessons, I'm coming to realize, are really just going over the artifact you've prepared. And I had three posters and two overheads today (for the two altogether). Phew. The kids read the first two pages of All Summer in a Day (thanks, Nancy!!), and I led them in finding the correct beginning sequence of events. None of the students did it on their own. I'm curious if older kids would pick that out easier and how quickly. I asked them a pretend test question out loud:

Which of these least describes the environment of Venus:

lush, barren, rainy, mountainous.

One student in each class raised their hand to answer "rainy" which was great, so I could remind them that the test will try to trick them! They must outsmart the testwriters!

In writing workshop, we quickly discussed setting, and then put that together with descriptive writing. I read them excerpts from a Goosebumps haunted house story, and the description of Mr Twit's disgusting beard. We call that kind of writing SNOT--Show and NOt Tell. I gave them seven "robot" sentences--It was hot. She was happy. etc and they were to come up with ways of showing that sentiment or setting with creative and sensory details. And ooh, there were some great ones! For one about "the house was scary" this girl wrote about how the house even avoided itself. For the "hot day" another girl wrote a whole paragraph with details about sweat, and frizzy hair, and smelling like garbage and cutting the humidity with a butter knife. All kinds of good stuff.

The past two days, I've had students stay at lunch with me to work on the library. It works well because I have a double period with that class around lunch--the periods before and after. So they're not late for anything. And boy, how it does help to have eight pairs of hands working on something, even if they're distracted, eleven-year-old hands. We've got almost all the nonfiction leveled (so phew--my AP no longer has anything on me, in case she was ever to check!), and all the books are fairly well sorted into genre and subgenre. Awesome.

Mr CuteTeacher invited me out with his friends tonight with an extra ticket, and--STUPIDLY!!--I declined on account of this alleged sickness. I've been kicking myself since. Stupid, stupid!! I figured I would get home and crash, since I've been so out of whack. But no, look at me, awake at 11pm after getting zero sleep. Stupid, stupid!

I am going to a meeting on Monday--field trip!--to be the school coordinator for one of the city promotions. And today I was asked to head up/coordinate donation drives for the hurricane relief effort. Wow. I'm excited to be becoming a more important part of the school community. I'm worried about my follow-through; I don't have the best track record with that. But I feel honored to be noticed for extra responsibility, and I hope I can handle it, along with teaching and coursework (thank god that's such a joke), as well as the grade field trip that I have so many ideas about. Whew.

It's Friday! Hurrah!