Ah, the perks of teaching...

Today was a "fast and furious" day. I was in a pretty good mood the whole day, until the last 20 minutes of school, when the kids would not just BE QUIET. They ended up leaving school late (their own fault!), though no one missed a bus. Perk one.

After school, we had a "brief teachers' meeting." Ha. We had yet again to talk about Proposition 301 money- money that should be added to our salaries, as it is with many other districts. However, we need to jump through about 438 hoops before we get said money. It's been a 2-month-long battle between the teachers and the administration about how to allocate the funds. Long story short, they win, we lose. The admin. tells the teachers how they will get the money, no matter how the teachers feel about it. Sucky. Thus, we all wasted 45 precious minutes after school discussing money we won't be getting. Perk two.

Upon the end of the meeting, a lot of us met up (accidentally) in the teachers' lounge for the usual mail-getting and copying duties that teaching entails every few hours of the working day. We all had a bag of unpopped popcorn in our mailboxes, so I popped mine immediately. Yay! Even though it was burned, I scarfed a lot of it down. One of the other teachers popped hers as well, and then noticed that it "smells funky." She checked the expiration date and, lo and behold, it expired in January of 2005. Ha. Turns out mine had an expiration date of 04/05. We joked that the district knew we couldn't afford to feed ourselves, and thus would eat whatever they gave us. Perk three.

Even though it's already after 5, I still have the following things to do by tomorrow:
-input 27 student's grades in ALL subjects (2 hours' work)
-clean the classroom (1 hour's work)
-finish preparing the materials for tomorrow's lessons (1/2 hour's work)
-call a few parents (~1/4 hour's work)
Perk four.

Finally, I had the students write things they've learned so far this year, and things they want to learn. Among the best are:

Things I've learned this year:
-"Why we have study hall"
-"Reading smoothly"
-"Don't judge people"
-"To be nicer"
-"dealling with people"
-"devition by desimals"
-"I've learned how great of a teacher I have."

Things I want to learn this year:
-"How to blance a bank akount"
-"How to disect a frog"
-"a little bite of division"
-"to be respectful and polite"
-"I want to lear algeebrah."
-"stop fighting with my brother"
-"how to make a sound out of my claroet"
-"biooligy"
-"I want to learn things that I dont already know."