today was...

today was one of those days where i seriously thought "why, am i teacher?" and it wasn't because of my children.  i will admit that my lesson planning isn't always as thought out as others, but i do know what i am doing since i have been teaching ramp up for the past three years (and it doesn't change!) but this week i did i planned an amazing lesson.  i planned an amazing cross-curricular lesson AND i planned an amazing lesson with my low kids and another teachers honors class but sadly that lesson did not happen.  why not?  why did we plan this lesson? i know you are all on the edge of your seat for these details so i will tell you why and why not.  we have begun the process of benchmark testing (insert groan here) and they (powers that be) are trying a new way to have my students test which seems to be working so i'm okay with it, but with that being said we were told that we would be holding our first hour for three hours when we were testing so we wouldn't have to worry about kids missing, kids rushing, etc.  this is why we planned an amazing lesson because we were allowed to plan a lesson we wanted to do that obviously fit in with our curriculum, which we did.  so, friday morning i come to school early and am talking with the other teachers about our lesson and then i run to get the lesson plan (did i mention i made a powerpoint for a few important things because i did) and when i get back they inform me our assistant principal told them oh they decided yesterday/this morning that we didn't have to hold our children for three hours anymore.  i understand that due to distract wide pd we had about fifteen teachers missing (don't get me started on that! i go next friday!)  these are brand spanking new teachers who look freaked out so i go talk to our new assistant principal and then our principal and they said "yes we don't have to hold, figure it out you can make something happen, etc." at that moment i am not proud to say i had to walk away so i didn't start throwing a temper tantrum or worse.  we had ten minutes to come up with a new lesson, which wouldn't be so hard except it was a friday, quite a few teachers were absent, and my first hour is ninety minutes because my ramp up classes are ninety minutes.  i managed to find some stuff for my kids to do, was it my awesome lesson?  no, was i disappointed? yes, did everything work out? somewhat!  the day only got worse from there but i'll blog about that and the interesting lesson we had planned later.  i promise i can only relive this day piece by piece.