Thursday, July 26, 2007

"It's our time, sweet babe, to break on through"

My schedule is out to kick my butt in more ways than one. One more day of Algebra Camp before I'm out on my own in rough-and-tumble world of middle school teaching. I've got to finish my portfolio and all my reflections for class to be turned in first thing Monday morning at the latest. But I've also got derby boot camp kicking my ass all night tomorrow and all day Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Then I've got to get a running start on my job and take care of some more paperwork issues and get my classroom set up and my procedures all laid out. Work officially starts Wednesday, 7:30 a.m. and I got the call from the school secretary this morning to remind me of that. All the other lucky bastards in my class have a couple weeks to recuperate. Next weekend is Satchmo Fest and my uncle is coming to town soon and the kids start in a week-and-half and I have no illusions that I will have any time for anything once that madness begins.

Have I mentioned that I'm exhausted?

All that said, derby was great today. Tough without leaving me feeling like I want to die. And my knee was cooperating thanks to the handy-dandy $20 knee brace. Let's just hope that continues.

The kids had a blast at camp today, thankfully. My lesson went over fabulously but I am about to strangle one of my girls, M. She has no focus and does not follow directions. C is so smart that he forgets that he should read the directions. And F is just an all around good kid to have. My project, LIII, was having a rough time today. He immediately shuts down when faced with a multi-step problem or anything that involves reading. When it comes to the computations he usually knows what he should be doing. But the reading really turns his head around backwards and I struggled to help him stay with the group. It was heartening to know, however, that sometimes when he appeared to be off task he was really just thinking the problem through and I wouldn't realize it until he answered my question 2 or 3 minutes after I'd asked it. I could tell that the other kids were starting to feel held back but none of them stepped in to help him and a sense of snobbery came peering through. They come from a much different school environment than LIII and they don't seem to know what to do with him so they just stick to themselves. I'd hold it against them but that wouldn't fix anything and they're all good kids, flaws and all.

This job is so big and I haven't even really started yet. Commence deer in headlights.

1 comment:

will said...

xkcd: Do Not Erase.

It had been so long, I forgot what DNE meant. Once I remembered, I laughed pretty hard.