Why Must Wednesdays Be So Long?!

Wednesdays are my long days. My days without prep. My days without alone time. My days where I don't generally leave campus until 4:30. My days that, sometimes, suck.

Don't get me wrong. I love me my second period prep. I love that on most days, I teach one period, get a break to regroup, have breakfast, make copies, and do everything else I need to do, and then teach the rest of my day. I had fourth period prep once; I hated it. I dislike afternoon free time because I don't generally use it effectively. I'm too tired by then to do anything productive and spent lots of it eating my lunch, reading the news, or milling around my classroom picking up stuff. But second period prep is awesome. But there's also no way around one day a week being incredibly long since the way our schedule works, Wednesdays and Thursdays each only have half our classes in block periods: Wednesdays are periods 1, 3, and 5, and Thursdays are periods 2, 4, and 6. So Wednesdays, I teach from 7:30 to 2:10 straight, with just a ten minute nutrition break and a half an hour lunch to break it up. Then 2:10 to 2:35 is Tutorial (which was PACKED today), and then 2:37 to 3:37 is Speech and Debate. Which, for us, was packed today, too. Which is excited. But still. The last Speech and Debaters left around 4:00 (they like to hang around. Which is cute. Sometimes.) Then I decided to try to speed-straighten up my classroom, which I do by setting a timer and blitz cleaning until it goes off. It was rather successful today, but I ended up leaving at about 4:40.

At least at that point I got to be alone.

Since I've been home (after a detour to Target and Trader Joe's), I've had dinner, assembled my outfit for the morP fashion show (why do I get talked into these things?!) (legwarmers, for cryin' out loud!), and baked some baby donut muffins (nom). I still need to make my lunch and pack my gym back for tomorrow, but that can be done as soon as I finish this.

But holy moly am I exhausted. Six straight hours of teaching is exhausting, even if two of my three classes today spent 30 minutes at the end of the 2 hour block writing an in-class essay. I still had to get them through rhetorical precis with a really stunningly challenging article from Time magazine called "Tickle Me Obama." They all completely missed the author's purpose of the article, so there was a lot of 'splainin' I had to do to get them through it. And I was a little mean to a student when she biffed it. I felt bad. But sometimes (and it's soooo rare in my classroom), you just have to tell a kid they're wrong. (I don't generally enjoy telling kids in an English class that they're wrong, because in my opinion, there's rarely a wrong answer. But with non-fiction, the rules are a little different and sometimes, you're wrong.) (Ugh politics cloud everything, too...)

Then in my fifth period class, there was a lot of silence, which annoys me on a fundamental level during a class discussion, but I need to get better about using my calling-on-kids-cards. I need to be training them better. I also need to not be behind in my sophomore curriculum! Oh well. All of next week will be devoted to writing instruction to prepare them for their essays. Huzzah writing instruction.

Feeling like I'm starting to hit the wall now -- sooo tired. And even propped up, my feet hurt. I must have done twelve laps around my classroom in each APEL period just passing back their summer assignments... but on the plus side, it's forcing me to learn names! Faster than ever! And with the biggest classes ever! Can't say I don't rise to a challenge.

Must go pack lunch and get right with the world before I collapse into bed momentarily. And yes, it's only 8:15 pm. What? I'm a teacher. It happens.