A Day Away

I'm one day away from a very needed break from the Coast. David and I are going to Southaven/Memphis this weekend to see our friends and celebrate our second anniversary a few days early. Hard to believe it's been 2 years since our wedding and less than 2 months til our baby boy arrives. Things are finally falling into place with that. We have furniture and most of our bigger pieces. Of course, there's still all the decorating, bath stuff, toiletries, bottles, socks, etc. stuff to get and do. But thanks to wonderful friends and co-workers, we have 3 showers approaching.

It's been an interesting week. It's 9 weeks test time, so let me recap the past few days. I created what I thought was a great unit on poetry, only to be interrupted by tests, so that's been put on hold. Tuesday I had a female student come to school drunk (c'mon, you're an 8th grader!!). Today was testing, and if you've ever taken a scantron test, you know they have spots A-E for answers. So if you have more answer options than 5, you can create combinations like AB. Simple enough, right? I suppose you can guess that that was an option today. I can't tell you how many times I heard, "Mrs. Ainsworth, what do we do with this? AB? How do we mark that?" Well, my dear children, you mark BOTH A and B. My children are dense. It's like they've never taken a test before on a scantron. Jeepers. I absolutely wanted to scream today. Of all things to not understand, THAT was it? Okay, so we're also undergoing SACS evaluations---meaning, if we're not accredited by SACS, diplomas mean diddly-squat from St. Martin. It's a big deal. And with our students' grades on their district assessments, we're not allowed to show movies or have parties. We have plenty we need to be covering. But here's my issue--my whole week has been shot with exam review, 2 days of testing, and next week I'm losing between 3-4 days to MCT practice testing. So again, no more poetry unit. I have 2 classes who tested today, so I have a wasted day tomorrow and can't show a movie. Thus, it's still a wasted day because what's the point in teaching one day of a unit no one will remember when I'll lose 4 days following it. Anyway. It's been a long week.