Day -4

Another day of not getting much work done. We were supposed to have 3 hours of meetings in the morning and then more than a half-day in our rooms for prep time. Instead, we had 5 hours of meetings in the morning, and then after lunch they decided to have grade-level team meetings for "just a half-hour" which turned into 90minutes.

In order to get a minimal amount of work done in my room I stayed two hours late. After coming in more than an hour early. Oh, well--might as well get used to the standard school schedule now. Just as I was planning to leave an administrator popped her head in the door and said "we are using your room for a science PD tomorrow. You need to clear the desks and lock up any supplies you don't want stolen." That added another 20 minutes to my day, and will likely cost me an hour or more of re-sorting and organizing time on Thursday.

At least I got the key to the book closet first: I scored all the best texts and even managed to get my dictionaries and thesauri from last year back. AND my two six-headphone listening stations made it through the summer unscathed. Unfortunately we don't have the teachers editions of the sixth grade texts: I'm not that concerned with the answers, but would like the questions and sidebars in the margins, because the required City curriculum refers to them quite often. I'll have to Rosetta Stone them and infer what these texts say when planning...

Tomorrow we're having off-site City-wide professional developments, guaranteed to be useless or your money back! The middle-school language arts crew is headed to West Baltimore Middle for 8 hours of eye-glazing redundancy. Can't wait.

Some kids were playing in the parking lot today as I left. One called me "penny head" and packed my shoes.