I was sick the last two days and stayed home to get rest. My puppy had injured herself playing on Saturday, so she was happy to have me home. We napped a lot.
Today I went back somewhat ready to face my room after being gone. I am an organized chaos sort of person. I love being organized, but I also tend to accumulate piles. There are always things that have yet to have been found a place to belong. While I may not be as clutter-free as I like, I do know where everything is. (I want to be the Clutter-Free Classroom when I grow up. It is on my to-do-list to do some of her clutter-free challenges. I have too many teacher materials that I need to part with, but I found it hard to let go of my hard-spend investment.) It is always hard after being gone to find everything has been turned, moved, or misplaced. This morning I discovered I no longer had dry erase markers or a trash can. How do you lose a 3 foot trash can?
Some of my students had chosen to be productive while I was gone. Others pretended to look busy. Friday is a teacher work day, so there is no school. They were not happy to discover that their work had to be done by Thursday, or it became homework over the weekend. The productive ones will have no problem. The pretenders will have a lot to get done tomorrow. Sometimes consequences are hard. I am glad my students were good while I was gone. It is amazing how much less whining there is when you are pretending to work versus actually working. I am going to tell you that technology is amazing. It also makes teaching more difficult at times. Using computers all day long means my students are learning so many useful skills for the future; it also translates to a million more ways to be distracted and off-task. Anyway, they were actually pretty productive today. We also go to read a little more of our Mythology unit, which we all enjoyed. I am getting ready for Poetry next week.
I came home to check on my poor, limping puppy to discover her anti-inflammatory medicine had not agreed with her stomach. She has had so few accidents in her three years that I know it caused her great distress to leave behind such a pile to be cleaned up. And oh, what a pile it was. The aromas that met me when I got home were certainly strong.
As I cleaned up the mess on my floor while my limping puppy watched and tried to erase the awful smell in my house, I just laughed. Today was not a horrible day. It was just a laughable day full of disheveled desks, missing markers, misplaced trash cans, recess troubles, overwhelmed whiners, and mushy piles of poo.
Blessings and good night! I hope you got a good laugh today, too.
You are so right- it's a matter of outlook. Yes, another referral today, but building character and responsibility...
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