A Day

Man, it's been a day. It's really been a day.

The morning was pretty good to start with; surprisingly, mostly everyone was quiet. Spelling tests were a bit of a mess. I discovered the IT guys wiped my class iPad of all music/sound files, including the spelling tests. Thankfully I have those files saved in another location, so it's not the end of the world, but it's adding more work to my plate and it was really frustrating to be down a device when I needed it and expected it to work. Grr...

We had our four student council hopefuls give their speeches to the class (there can only be two). One girl (who wants to be president when she grows up) had pages of speech written down. Another boy brought a poster he'd made with reasons why people should vote for him. The other two had notebooks of ideas of things they wanted to accomplish while in office. The speeches were interrupted by reading buddies with the 1-2nd graders, which sparked an idea in my mind. Since the 1-2nd graders don't have representatives in student council, why couldn't they vote for the 5-6th grade representatives? Mrs. L thought it was a great idea, so she typed up ballots and her class came back to mine after recess to hear the speeches. It gave the candidates a chance to change their speech if they wanted to. The girl who wants to be president won one seat, one of the kids who wrote things in notebook paper won the other seat. Someone asked him a question right before he sat down that gave him an edge. When asked why he was running now when he didn't like being on it in the past, he answered truthfully, something along the lines of now that a different teacher is running it, he wants to give it a try, plus he likes to decide things and if he doesn't get to choose and he doesn't like what someone else chose, he gets crabby. So why not try to make the decisions? I thought it was a good answer.

We ran into a time crunch before lunch because I had to wrangle papers. Spelling workbooks, tests, and handwriting were due today, all before lunch, so it took a while to check all those papers. The school cook asked if I'd like to switch times with Mr. E's class to give me more time. I really don't want to switch since I will end up eating all my lunch outside if we do (since the 7-8th graders eat super fast and will be pushing for recess), but that may have to happen since it takes my class so long to pack up. Sigh.

Then, during lunch the student sitting next to me stood up to go dump his tray, tipped it because he wasn't paying attention, and ended up dripping lunch liquid all over my sweater, shirt, and pants. Thankfully it dried clear and wasn't very noticeable after it dried. I remembered to unload the dirt from the back of my car, but the bag had a few holes and I got brown dribbles on my pants too. Another sigh.

We made our church year chain for art today. My rowdy boys got waaaay too rowdy and couldn't settle down. It was all I could do to keep them in the classroom. We did finish the chain, though I need to hang it up still.

The worst part of the day happened after school. A pair of parents asked to talk to all of us teachers together. Their student has been having some atypical health issues this year and a recent doctor's visit revealed that this child will need brain surgery next week. They still don't know a lot about the situation, and I can't share much, but this student needs lots of prayers. So please add her and her family to your list!