This week has been… rough. Super busy and stressful. My husband and I got into a bit of a fight. Im tired of fighting with my husband over the same shit, but it didn’t help me recognize how much I hate sitting down and planning with another person, and how now I’m doing that all the time at work, with my student teacher, and I’m not handling it very well.
I’m taking tomorrow off to get ready for the first night of a camping trip with my son (and many other 4th grade families). Except my son’s throat is now sore. It may be from the poor air quality this week (there are two fires burning up north), but probably he’s just getting sick. I really hope he can go. He’s been waiting to be a part of this camping trip for literally years.
It took me about four hours to prep for my day off tomorrow. I need to find a way to shorten that prep time, because if I’m spending more than half the amount of time I’ll be out, getting ready for being out, it’s not really worth taking the hours. There must be a way to shorten that, but in 20 years I’ve never found it. And tomorrow my student teacher will be there! She can’t sub for me yet, but she can basically run the first three classes. So why did it take me so long to write my sub plans?! Ugh, there is nothing I hate worse about being a teacher than being absent. Such a pain in the ass.
And if I did all that, just so my son could get sick and not go… Ugh.
I also hoped to take a couple hours for myself tomorrow. I wanted to run. And maybe sit on the couch. My guess is only one of those will happen and I’ll prioritize the run. Only if the air quality is okay for it.
I’m not looking forward to this camping trip. My husband was supposed to take this on, but his friend is coming in from New York and I didn’t want to make him miss seeing his friend, so I offered to go the first night. I’ll be leaving our son with a friend’s family in the morning and driving back home, so my husband can take the car back down to the camp site. I have book club at 1pm and we’re talking about Demon Copperhead, which I loved.
Saturday night my daughter’s friends are spending the night. So it won’t be low key, but I can probably hide downstairs for most of it.
Some good news from this week: I ran in my new Hoka’s without hip/side of thigh pain. Also they are pretty (I put the rainbow laces on and like them even more).
We got a puzzle from the Murakami exhibit at the Asian Art Museum and we’ve had fun working on while listening to our audiobook. We finally finished The Hollow Boy! Now on to Lockwood & Co book 4.
I taught the teens class at the dojo today and it went well.
I remember…. 2 weeks of double hours before a two week vacation and then 2 weeks of double time on return. Does make it hard to believe the vacation was really worth taking.
I am always impressed at how much you take on….. and then I remember back to when I was your age….. and tell myself that your age simply CAN do more….. but you ought not need to do so much. It wasn’t good for me and isn’t for you either!
Full disclosure: I’m a teacher and have a hard time taking my own device. But… you shouldn’t be spending four hours prepping to be out for one day. Can’t you give them a packet of review work for while you’re gone? Is that the norm in your school or do other teachers plan as elaborately as you do? One day of doing busy work/review work every so often is not going to make or break their learning experience this year. Plus, you can put all the time in beforehand but it likely won’t be executed as effectively as it would if you were there, even with a student teacher or a sub you know. As long as you’re only out every so often, I would focus on keeping kids occupied and practicing things they’ve already been taught.