You Know What's NIce?

You know what's nice?

What's nice is having enough experience that I can leave my classroom Friday afternoon, exhausted from my migrane, not knowing what I'm going to do with my students on Monday, and not worrying one bit about it, because I know I can come in Monday morning, look at the book, and decide which short story to start that will get us productively 3.5 days through the shortened week 'til the end of the quarter.

What's nice is being confident and experienced enough to be able to gauge their ability against the material to create assignments that will fit perfectly into that 70% of a school week, so that I don't have to worry about it over the weekend.

That's what's nice.

Do You Hear That?

Woke up at 3 AM with a migrane. Almost didn't come in, but since I was going to give the writing prompt today, I decided I could make it.

The writing prompt, for those of you who don't know, is a quarterly test of students' writing skills. The kids are given a sheet of paper with a question, or a proposal, or something to read and respond to, and given the entire class hour to create an on-demand response.

Fast and Furious with a pen, you might say.

After I got them started, I sat on my stool behind my podium, half the lights out (light and noise are anathema to migrane sufferers), trying to score the essays from their novel exams from yesterday. It was slow going, what with all the interruptions to answer kids' questions & hush them when they forgot to give the late-finishers some quiet working time.

But there were a few moments when the room got quiet enough that we all could hear the soft pattering of the light rain on the concrete outside. That part was calming.

And now I'm going to go home and try to fall asleep in a dark, quiet room. I have three periods of essays to finish this weekend, plus about 160 book projects to read/score, so that next week I'll have time to read/score the writing prompt essays they produced today. Don't tell me how lucky I am to have summers off. I put in 2000 hours a year (40 hrs. x 50 wks.) just like anyone else: I just do it all in under 10 months.