Mid-week Break!

This is the first day of spring, it's my 1111th post (a neat number), and I got to miss school for a legitimate reason! What a nice day.

I went to CPR training, which, since it benefits the school, won't count against my attendance record. Sweet! And it's free through the DOE. Double sweet! My friend N had discovered it, so I got to hang out with her, which is always fun. She teaches a different grade than I do, so we don't get tons of hang out time at school.

The people at the training were fun and friendly (well, except for the idiot woman next to me), although the facilitator was pretty icky. His ego was the size of his waistline, which was also too large. But the time went quickly, and we learned all the "new" ways to do CPR. (Does anyone else find it strange and/or alarming that CPR techniques change?)

Oh, and I had time to grade two classes of tests from Tuesday. Excellent!

We were done before 2pm, so N and I went for a leisurely lunch (we hadn't had a break all day and were both starving). We talked a lot about ideas and plans and possibilities for next year. She's the quiet star teacher of her grade, and I really admire her work, both with curriculum and with her students. But like many of us, she's tired of the same old crap at school and in the NYC system, so she's going to leave next year.

Our grade department has a vacancy this year and next year two more will be leaving. Besides me, the other teacher is older, on her own planet, never comes to meetings, etc, so she doesn't really count. If I stay, I'll be the only returning teacher in our grade department. That's kind of a lot of pressure, and next year I wouldn't have any competent peers with whom to collaborate.

I've got lots of things swirling around in my mind about next year, and I want to do a separate post about it, which will hopefully help me organize and prioritize my thoughts.

Anyway, after our pleasant lunch, I got home and did my laundry, hurrah!, and then got to work on grades. Double hurrah! They're due next Wednesday and I have done no inputting so far this quarter. Tonight I got two classes completely up to date! HURRAH for me finally doing some work at home!

When we got the grades yesterday, I told myself that I would work on them a little at home. But once I was home, after playing around on the internet, I decided I would rather clean the bathroom and take some pictures for an older Utata Iron Photographer. Nice priorities, right?

I love having a day off in the middle of the week. I hope that my kids were decent today and got their work done. Two more days this week; I'll be finishing up the diagramming by doing some prepositions and pronouns.

Next week--which is the last week before spring break! woohoo!!--I simply must get to work on some real writing. I've been letting my grammar work take up a whole period, partly because I know the students work well with structure and rules, partly because they really need grammar work, and partly because I didn't want to teach a new project and have half the class do none of the work.

So we've had two weeks of grammar and reading, and I hope that next week they're ready to do some real writing and attempt l!t c!rcles (for the two lower classes). Wish us all luck, and wish me patience!