Monday

Update on Costumes: I finished McKenzie's top. Yeah! Still need to do skirt and wings for both girls. Am I crazy or what? For some reason, I just cannot fathom buying costumes. It's become such an important tradition and I really love the creative part of it. I just wish it wasn't so time consuming!

Normal day at work. My students have been busy evaluating the validity of sources this past week, not an easy skill for eighth grade. We were comparing different biographies of Edgar Allan Poe and noting inconsistencies and then determining how we could figure out which story got it right. It is so hard to get eighth graders to think for themselves. Typically, they just want to know "what do I write in the box?" And I am trying so hard to get them on the path toward critical thinking! It's tough. For those of you who are not familiar with my position, I teach reading. I have no curriculum, meaning no textbook to teach from. I have a list of 47 essential skills to teach, but it is entirely up to me how to teach them. I like the total control but it in overwhelming to find everything on your own. It takes tons of planning and prep time.

The quarter ends on Wednesday so it's time to catch up on all the grading, etc. Of course today is when the district's server went down, so we had no access to our electronic gradebook. Ugh! Tonight I need to grade a stack of papers (and hope the server is up in the morning so I can input grades), write lesson plans for the rest of the week, create and print the schedule for student book talks, and develop the rubric for next week's in-class project (writing an obituary for Edgar Allan Poe). And oh yeah. . . finish two costumes, feed two children, and clean the kitchen. My life is crazy.