well hello again...

I teach at a year-round school which meant that I had a two week spring break!  I spent part of week one teaching intersession and then the rest of the week taking care of myself.  I found myself starting to burn out mentally and I decided that wasn't going to help my kids so I took the rest of the week off.  I felt bad not finishing intersession but we had more than enough teachers and not enough students so I did it and to be honest it felt nice.  I spent the second week of spring break with my husbands family in San Antonio, Texas.  I had a blast!  My husband is the youngest of three and his brother and sister both have two children.  I MELT when I hear the words "Aunt Jen" Prior to marrying my husband I had one nephew (and it was because I have known Parker's mom my ENTIRE life.) A week of hearing "Aunt Jen" and I still melt.  This was my first family vacation with my new family and it was great.  I loved  getting to know my new family since we are all so spread out.  What did you do for spring break this year?

One of the problems with a two week spring break was that the kids came back on Monday crazy, crazy, and crazy.  We had beautiful weather (no air conditioning because that doesn't come on until the 15th!) and no one wanted to pay attention or review things we had previously discussed.  Not to mention just like last year the America's Choice people showed up on the day we got back from Spring Break.  I love our new America's Choice rep but seriously?  Why would you show up then?  I have been teaching for three years and have received two bad reports as a teacher and both occured last year from our old AC rep.   The first one was the week after spring break and I had been gone the week prior to spring break for oh my wedding in South Carolina.  The sub(s) had not done any of the work I had assigned so I had to come back to "make up" work with my kids.  Strike One against me!  The next bad review was the week after state testing.  I hadn't seen my first/second hour kids (I teach 90 minutes) in probably over a week and right before the rep comes in my kids were telling me they didn't have to learn anymore because we were done with testing.  Obviously I had a discussion explaining why that was wrong, blah, blah, well then I tried to take my kids on a virtual field trip and of course NONE of the computers were working.  I had done this field trip with my other students and they had liked it, the computers had work, and now while I'm being observed nothing worked.  It was horrible because I could see everything blowing up in my face but couldn't stop it.  Not to mention the woman kept leaving the room so she would miss my having to discipline the kids and she wanted to know why all of the sudden the assistant principal had shown up in my room. I had called her to come down because I had warned the kids if they didn't start behaving she would be down to take some kids to ISS.  Can you tell I'm bitter?  These reviews didn't hurt me professionally but they hurt me personally because I put my heart and soul into teaching and well just like in the real world things happen to derail us. 

Have you ever had that happen to you? 

Wow this is a long post and please excuse the run ons, spelling errors, etc.  I am not going to double check things because if I do I'll probably end up deleting things, writing more, you know the curse of being long winded. 

I hope you have had a good weekend....