House of Zathras

I just can’t pull it together. I don’t know if it’s the holiday stress, work stress, or family stress.

I just want to run away. But I can’t. I did skip a meeting after school today to try to straighten up my room. I have an evaluation on Monday, and I want things to look nice. But when I started sorting one pile, it led to moving it to yet another pile, which led to finding another pile, until I was really just walking circles around the room. I’ve resigned myself to having to go to school on Saturday to get things done.

And sometime in January, I’ll be forced out of my classroom for a few days while maintenance paints my room and puts in a drop ceiling. Which means everything has to be pulled off the walls, removed from my storage area, put in a pile in the middle of the room, and then my class goes to a portable with no computers or smart board or centers or classroom library for at least two days. AND I have a technology conference in Orlando the 12th – 15th of January. What do you bet the painting and conference occur in the same week?????

And I just had to pay $500 to get new tires and brake work done on my SUV. And the dog had to go to the vet…add $117 to unplanned expenses.

So with all that hanging over my head, I skipped the meeting. It was just my fellow grade level teachers, and thankfully they understand. They won’t ‘report’ me. But I couldn’t face one more requisite of my job or my life. I get up at 5:30 every day, bust my ass trying to meet all the increased requirements of education these days, take my daughter to and from school, run errands, cook dinner, try to get some computer time to unwind, do laundry, try to do some more school work, and wind up in bed around 11:00 PM. I’d like to go to bed earlier, but I’m just too ‘antsy’…so much crap is running through my mind I can’t relax. And if I manage to go to bed earlier, I tend to wake up after five hours of sleep and then can’t get back to sleep. But I’m too tired to get up and do anything.

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Let’s change the direction of this post…we were taking a Spelling Test today. I caught one of my students pulling a spelling list out of his desk and copying the words. He’s a good kid, and I was kind of surprised. In talking to him, I asked him why he was cheating. He said he didn’t know it was cheating…that he thought cheating was when you looked on someone else’s paper. *sigh* I explained that if it wasn’t coming out of his own brain, it’s cheating. So now, he gets to write the spelling words 10 times each for homework and dad has to sign a note about it.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that kids do not have the same frame of reference and experience as adults with common-sense issues. Which is why it’s so important that the guiding figures in their lives BE guiding figures. Kid can’t raise themselves. Unfortunately, too many of them are doing just that. *sigh*

I think it’s time for some eggnog and Southern Comfort…a good nighttime toddy lately.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Angst (mine, kids', whoever wants it, come and get it), Holidays, School Stuff, Southern Comfort, kids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.