Yeah...um....

...so, guess who left her dome light on in her new car, and drained the battery, so the new car wouldn't start after school, when she was in a mad dash to get the hell out of Englewood, to pick up her son at school? What, no guesses? Yeah, I don't know anyone that dumb, either....

Today was actually an OK day. The morning started with an unexpected staff meeting for primary teachers(K-2) in MY ROOM! I walked in just as the 8:30 bell was about to ring (which made me feel late, even though 8:30 is technically our start time) and New Principal had hung a sign on the time clock about the meeting. So, I rushed down to my room to gather together the handful of "grown-up chairs" I have in there.

The meeting consisted of us walking around each other's rooms with a checklist, critiquing and commenting on what we did or didn't see. (for example, word walls, student work, classroom libraries, etc.) Each category had sub-categories (Classroom Library-Is there a check out system in place? Does it have a large number of books? Are there a large variety of genres? Is it comfortable and inviting? and so on) My room right now is a hot mess (as we would say in Englewood) because I've just been trying to get through one day at a time, with too many babies crammed into too small a room.

I don't mean to toot my own horn, but for the past 8 years, my room has frequenctly received compliments and high praise for being so colorful, exciting and inviting to students. However, after the beginning of the year fiasco (cleaning issues, etc.) much of my stuff had been taken down, some thrown out (and NOT by me!!), and most never made it back up. I normally have everything that can possibly be labeled labeled. There are usually posters and so on all over the room.

My classroom library was actually organized, with every basket labeled according to genre. Unfortunately, when my stuff was moved out into the hallway for cleaning, my books were just randomly dumped then shoved back on the shelves, so it's just a disaster now. I was actually embarrassed to have my colleagues looking around.

Oh, and you'll love this one! I still don't have a word wall going. I covered my back board before school started, and put up a label that says "Word Wall," but never did anything else to it. I JUST yesterday put up the letters of the alphabet so that I can start putting up the words under each letter. That's ALL that is on there right now. Talk about doing a crappy job!! I was mortified. I thought for sure New Principal would have a lot to say about that. We were all given a checklist for each room we went to, and we were to fill it out and then leave it, face down, on each teacher's desk. I was dreading looking at the sheets on my desk.

New Principal must not be as upset with me as I thought, though, because just after school started, she came to my room with a woman and said, "This is Mrs. C., and she'll be here to help you all day, in any way you need." I almost kissed her right then and there!! Turns out, the woman was called by sub center to sub in our preschool today. However, when she went down there, no one was there. Turns out that, for some reason, there is two days of in-service scheduled for preschool, so classes were cancelled for today and tomorrow.

So, she was mine all day! It was awesome having an extra teacher in the room. Trust me, I SO appreciate having Ms. H. for the couple of hours a day that she's with me. But, having someone who actually knows how to deal with the babies was a blessing. The poor thing spent most of her day basically serving as a personal aide for one of my boys who really ought to be in a self-contained SpEd room. (Too bad we don't have those anymore at the Hell-Hole!) It was so great to not have to continually stop teaching to deal with his disturbances. Ms. H. does what she can, but she's had no formal training, obviously, to deal with these things. (She did, however, take him out of the room for me yesterday, which was nice, too.)

We had our first fire drill today, which was a bit of an inconvenience. Naturally, it happened during my prep. Now, at a normal school, the prep teacher would take the class outside and deal with things, right? Well, not here. We were told, by the parent volunteer who was walking around giving teachers the heads-up, that we needed to go up and get our kids for the fire drill. WTF? I was on my way up to the freakin' 4th floor when Mrs. H. passed me and said she was on her way to get the babies. God bless her heart! I told her I was going to duck into the bathroom real quick (cuz I'd been holding it for about 2 hours!) and I'd meet her up there. Of course, the alarm sounded as I was half-way there. I was AWESOME having another adult, in this case 2 adults, to keep the kids in line and quiet. What we're supposed to do is walk at the front of the line and guide the babies to our safe area. But, anyone who's ever walked little ones anywhere knows that you need to lead, bring up the rear, and occasionally attend to the middle, all at the same time! Now that I think about it, there were actually 4 adults because the gym teacher was with us, as well.

Luckily, the drill only lasted about 5 minutes, which meant there was still 20 minutes of gym left. I think the gym teacher thought I was going to take them back to the room, but he was sadly mistaken!! The rest of the day went pretty quickly. After gym, it was snack time. I took a small group of 6 back to the carpet with me to work on drawing and labeling a goldfish (our current science unit) while the rest ate their cookies and watched Chicka Chicka, Boom Boom. (Yes, AGAIN! They adore it, what can I say? And, I can seriously tell that it's having an impact on their letter recognition.) Before I knew it, it was time to go!

Now, you KNOW this day went to smoothly too be a day at the Hell-Hole, right? So go back up to top and remind yourself how the school day ended...go 'head, I'll wait....yeah, that's right. I'm a dork!! But, seriously, I didn't even sweat it. It took all of 5 minutes to jump it with the car parked next to me, and I was on my merry way. Right now, as I type this, there's a cool breeze blowing in my kitchen windows, and I can smell the chocolate chip cookies baking at the Nabisco factory. It smells like heaven!! I'm about to go down in the basement and do about 5 loads of laundry so I can pack for this weekend. I want to pack tonight just in case I decide to leave straight from school tomorrow.

I hope you all have a wonderful Labor Day weekend. See you when I get back. :)

Wow, I just realized that I started this post over two hours ago, but half-way through my sister called me from Italy, and we talked for nearly two hours. I think my Sissy is lonely. :(