Gripes and Grumbles

Happy Halloween! I meant to post this yesterday but it didn’t happen. Par for the course around here lately. {I do plan on participating in NaBloPoMo this year, though my recent track record would suggest I will struggle to post daily.}

Blerg. I try to keep it pretty positive here, but sometimes you just need to get out the gripes and grumbles, you know? And now is one of those times.

I lost a bag with some running clothes and my (very expensive) pair of Shokx open ear headphones. I remember I threw it all in a TJs bag and brought it into my room one day when I hoped to run after work. But I didn’t end up running and that bag went… who knows where! I haven’t run in ages so I didn’t realize it was gone until I went last weekend. At first I thought I just misplaced the headphones, but then I went looking for that particular running shirt and couldn’t find it either and remembered THE BAG. I have spent hours looking for THE BAG to no avail. I would look all over at home, then assume it was at school. Then I’d look all over school and assume it was at home. I was still in this endless cycle of increasing frustration when I went looking for a blue tutu I swore was at school (I have a bunch of different colored tutus for class video skits), but that was gone too! So I added a blue tutu to my “it’s at school, no it’s at home” cycle and thoroughly lost my mind.

At one point I realized I was as mad about the time I was wasting as I was about the lost items, and I finally just let it go.

Except, when I look for something for long enough I just get in that mindset and every time I walk into a room I look around wondering, could it be hiding in here? It’s truly driving me crazy. I HATE losing things. I’ve lost so many things in my life. I hope when I die I get to sit in a room and watch a slide show of where everything I lost ended up going, complete with a flimsy tripod holding the projector screen.

Another thing driving us crazy is our academic calendar. They moved our January PD (professional development) to Nov 1st, which means we have one less instructional day in our first trimester. I do get to visit our feeder high school that day, which I’m VERY excited about, but that day off is making it hard to finish everything I need to comfortably in the first trimester.

My next gripe is actually about the regular calendar because Thanksgiving week being the last week of November is making me crazy. Because it’s so late, we end our first trimester a week before the break, and have one week of the second trimester right before the week off. This is soooo annoying for so many reasons (assessments that count for Tri1, need to happen in Tri1, which means will be starting new material and then leaving for a week long break. Blerg.) But my grievances don’t stop there! The late Thanksgiving Break means we only have 3 weeks of instruction in December, except it’s not even a full three weeks because we have Friday 12/20 off and that Thursday is a short day?! Why?! Again, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have an assessment when we come back from a two week break – somethings really should get done before we leave for such a long time. And when we come back from that break we’ll have TWO FULL WEEKS before MLKJr day off on 1/20. UUUUGH.

I really do not appreciate our academic calendar this year. It’s making the part of me that loves to make things fit nicely into the time provided want to tear her hair out.

Update: I planned out November and December for my 1A class and I feel a lot better about it.

Many of my classes have been watching Coco this week, as a culmination of our Day of the Dead unit, and I’ve been trying to use that time to put barcodes on all the books in my 1A and 1B libraries. I finally figured out how to generate the barcodes, but didn’t realize until it was too late that they printed in a totally random order. It took forever to locate each one. The good news is, I think I know how to avoid it happening for my 1B library. Fingers crossed!!!

Speaking of work gripes, I have so many kids this year who are missing so much school. I have 11 students who have missed 7+ days already this school year! I probably spend a third of my time posting digital copies of work for missing students (which they don’t do), or responding to their emails, or scoring and inputting their work weeks after we did it. I obviously don’t want students here sick, but none of these students are out for that many days because they are really so sick they need to stay home each time. School avoidance is real and it’s a massive time suck for teachers. Massive. (A few of these students are missing school for travel sports, which I will not speak my mind on because my views might not be popular.)

My final grumble is that I got my son’s cold. It’s not a bad one, but I don’t feel great. And today I’ve sneezed a thousand times I swear! I’m not sure what is going on, but my nose just itches constantly and I’m sneezing like crazy. It’s driving me nuts!

Tonight my daughter will be out with her friends and I’ll be taking my son out with his friend group. I’m exhausted and just want to stay home, but my husband is still in Dubai so I’m on tonight. Blerg. Maybe next week will be better…? I can’t believe tomorrow is November.