back to school

So it's that time of year again. We've had a week of getting ready for school to start. We had one great training on writing. Two days of pointless inservice. And two days to get our rooms ready. This is going to be an interesting year on my campus. Our district is building new schools and combining some schools. My campus is combining with "M" school on their old property. So this year M school is on our backyard in portable city. Over 500 students, grades PK-5. I'm glad I'm not out there. We're operating as separate campuses until we actually move into the new building. We do have to share our gym and let pk and k eat in our cafeteria. We have lots of lost parents and many more workers wandering our halls looking for M. Not sure how you didn't notice all the portables!

I plugged in my fridge Wednesday and went to a meeting. Came back and smelled some sort of electrical burn scent. Discovered my fridge wasn't working. I was smart enough to test the plug and discover I had a whole wall of outlets not working. The teacher next door doesn't have power in one outlet on our shared wall. I looked outside and saw all sorts of wires sticking out of the roof. That doesn't look safe at all! I'm guessing they tapped into our power to run some portables outside my room and overloaded it. That's my expert electrical analysis! So for now I have plugged a few extension cords into each other and ran them all around my room just so I can have my fridge! Doesn't that look nice? It's a cell phone pic - sorry about the quality!

I do have one major complaint this year. I have lunch duty. For 55 minutes. That means I lose all that instruction time! And there were already 8 people on duty at the same time with me for about 100 kids. That hour will cost me 4 groups - 16 kids. I pack my schedule and don't have any time for this! Wouldn't my time be better spent trying to get kids to read?! Those 16 kids I'm cutting are losing out on their small group time that is focused on their weaknesses. It just frustrates me. I guess that I'll save time writing lesson plans and prepping for them - whoop-ti-do.