First Days…

Well, here I am half-way through the first week of school.  Not too much happened…other than one of my students who has ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) chose to physically choke another of my students during PE yesterday.  The poor chokee had to go home early with red marks all around his neck and the choker got 1.5 days in On-Campus suspension.  Well, I have many feelings about this situation.

1.  I’m doing the research on this ODD thing, but I’m not sure I’m buying it.

2.  If my child was choked at school and the kid who did it only got  1.5 days in OCS, I think I’d be pushing for a bit more.

The other gem of the week is a new student who apparently thinks I’m an idiot.  To shorten the story, I’ll cut to the details.  Everyone else had the chance to exchange papers to grade, but this particular student had taken too long, so I was standing over her shoulder grading her paper as I read the answers aloud.  When I was finished, I marked -2 at the top of her page and put the percentage.  This morning when I was putting grades in the computer, I came upon this paper.  I found my -2 erased and replaced with -0, 100%.  Are you kidding me?  Either she thinks I’m a complete idiot, or she’s an idiot.  We’ll be having some words…

This is just so wrong…

Our campus is undergoing construction.  As a result of this construction I was fortunate enough to move out of portable hell and move into a nice classroom.  Portable hell would be the classrooms that will be in the middle of construction for two years.  They currently have no internet and their power is questionable.  I definately would not like to be there.  However, there is something wrong with where I am.  In that there is so much construction, many “creatures” are being uprooted from their homes and looking for new ones.

Culprit #1–the cockroach.  Enough said.  They are disgusting and everywhere.  I do not have running water in my classroom, so my situation is not as bad as others.  However, they are everywhere!  To the point that we’ve asked for desks for them.  If they’re going to be around on Monday when the students return, they might as well learn, right?

Culprit #2–spiders.  My friend across the hall has so many itsy bitsy spiders in her room that she can literally work at her desk, go away for 15 minutes, and return to her desk covered in spider webs.

Culprit #3–Thursday morning a parent was visiting with a counselor to get her student set up for th new year.  As they were talking, the mother pointed out A MOUSE running across the counselor’s desk.   What am I doing here?

So now, there are roach and mouse traps all over the front office as well as several classrooms.  I might add that there are no vacancies at these roach motels.  It is disgusting.  They are filled with the little vermin.

One final story.  We go to our first staff meeting of the year, when the principal hands out staff handbooks.  By the way, I’m sitting front and center because my friend thinks this is a good idea.  Principal is talking…blah blah blah…and I am bored.  So, I open my handbook to pass the time.  I stifle a scream as there is a live roach crawling around the first page.  Friend next to me looks over and is also caught in a fit of giggles…now we’re getting the evil eye for being on the front row and goofing off.  I push the binder to the edge of the table until after the meeting and then hand it back to principal.  He opens it, laughs at me, shakes the roach to the ground, stomps on it, and then hands the handbook back to me.  I inform him that I don’t want that one and he needs to find me another one.  Boy’s P.E. teacher comes by at this moment, also laughing at me, and hands me his staff handbook because he doesn’t really need his.  Again, what am I doing here?

My Classroom

Well, I think I’ve got my classroom just about done for the year. As promised, here are some pictures. I’m not as cool as other people with all their blog knowledge and what not, so I don’t really know how to upload pictures. But, here’s my best shot.

This is my desk in the back corner of the room. The top has things about me for the students and the bottom will be where I post things for myself.

A view of the back of the room and half the computer lab.The colored swatches are for posting student work.

The side of the room with encouragement posters and the other half of the computer lab. The windows are covered with contact paper because the hallway to lunch is right outside of m room. All of those extra chairs on the side are waiting for custodial to take them out.

This side of the room has student files (colored bins on the counter), the homework calendar, and the hanging (red) file for extra worksheets. The whole left side of the counter is full of more crap I’m waiting for the custodians to take away. The apples at the top of the room are our countdown until the end of the year…yes I count down from day 1.

The front of the room has my standard/objective/assignment chart and my teaching cart. The cart has a computer, document projector, and LCD projector. This is all new for this year as I’m trying something new. If it doesn’t work, I’ll go back to the tall cart in the background that will not have a computer on it. We’ll see. I’ll have to move it around every period for the students to get to their desks. As you can see, we’re a bit crowded in here.

I’m not digging the shortness of space I have this year. In addition to my teacher furniture, there are 37 desks in the room as well as 18 computer stations. There’s just not really enough room to move the desks around in many different configurations. This is very different than previous years for me as I tend to move desks every 6 weeks or so.

I felt like I got nothing done when I went in today. We had to label all of our furniture to get moved to the new rooms, and in that process all 37 of my desks got nasty packing tape residue on them. So, I spent over an hour using some cleaning stuff I got from the custodian and a razor to scrape it all off. I also re-organized all the files on my computer, so that is very nice and systematic for my type-A personality.

With my room looking ready for the first day, I’m now looking at my syllabus, class procedures, and lesson plans. Things are looking up! I’m hoping to feel fully confident for Monday!

House Fiasco Part II

Thanks for the encouragement.  While everyone agreed that we should sell the house and get out, which I would also love to do…We live in Southern California.  Right now the market in good old SoCal is so bad that we would lose thousands of dollars on the house.  We’re hoping to hold onto the house until the market turns up at least a little bit.  The decision husband and I have come to (though he is extremely peeved about it) is to first look into the co-signing thing.  If there’s a way we can do it where she has no rights over the house, we’ll do that.  If there isn’t, then I’m going to pick up some extra hours and he’s going to try to work and go to school for his last quarter and we’re going to come up with the extra $500-$600 for the mortgage the next 6 months.  By that time, husband should have finished accounting degree (and hopefully acquired some sort of decent paying job) and my Master’s degree will (hopefully, cross your fingers) be done and I will receive a 10% raise.  Both of these factors put together should make us able to refinance under our own names and even get a pretty decent loan.  We’ll see.  I’ll keep you posted.  We haven’t run this idea past mom yet.  Hopefully it will work for her.  By the way, did I mention that when she came into a bit of money about 6 months ago she said she would pay off the second mortgage and then decided to totally change her mind?  Yeah…that’s what we’re dealing with here…

Thesis News

We’ve tabled the house discussion until Friday.  Husband and I are trying not to stress out too much.  We batted around ideas and decided to talk to Refinance Man on Friday.  I believe we’ll be making some sort of a decision before next week.  Thanks for the input.  We have thought about selling the house; however, the downside to selling is losing the equity we would make over the next year or two.  My personal prediction is that husband and I will figure out how to make an additional $600/month.  He doesn’t know it quite yet, but that’s my proposed plan.

In other news…the thesis that has been the pain in my side all summer has finally made some headway.  After writing three drafts of chapter 3 and getting rejected every time, I stopped at an outline this time.  Gave Head Chairperson a couple of weeks and then went in to see her today.  Not surprisingly, she hadn’t read it yet.  Oh well.  That’s how things have gone.  However, when she read the hard-copy I brought in she said it looked very good and I should proceed!  Yay!  What that means is I will be bum rushing the thesis over the next three weeks before I start my last class!  Soon….very soon…I will no longer go to school =).