One more day.....

Believe it or not, the year is (almost) over. One more day and that is it. Another year ended, another group of students sent off to lead their lives and follow their futures.

The last few days have been a frenetic flurry of activities: finishing report cards, coordinating end of year gifts, planning parties, contacting parents, entering data into our data base, administering and scoring those last assessments....I fall asleep with a to-do list running through my head and wake up with three more things added to it in the morning.



Today was cleaning day. Oh, the cleaning. You know the Tazmanian devil? The one from the cartoons that creates a whirlwind while grunting in a gutteral language? That's about what it was like in my classroom today, except the background music was provided by my students' Ipods. Oh yeah, and there were twenty three tazmanian devils. We cleaned and dumped and scrubbed and danced and sang all at once. Quite amazing actually-- especially when my classroom mysteriously turned into some crazy musical with four of my girls doing a coordinated line dance with twirls and everything while singing along to Cotton Eyed Joe. I looked around for cameras convinced I had landed in some School of Rock type show. Although, an hour and a half into it, with my headache growing steadily worse, I decided it was time to stop and have some quiet reading time. (Of course, my headache was getting steadily worse because of the number of times I needed to answer the question "What do we keep at school? Can I bring this home?" Despite telling them- repeatedly- what needed to stay and writing it in big red letters on the board: PENCIL, WRITERS NOTEBOOK, BOOK TO READ. Simple, right? Apparently not. I think I should have tallied how many times a student approached me, it might have been a world record of some sort.) Needless to say, my room was a bit of a disaster and actually looks a little as if a tornado really had struck it. Even more shocking is I left it in that state when I walked out the door to attend our staff party. Ah well. We have one more day after all.....

I did get my class gift today. I got seriously lucky this year: no smelly lotions, mugs or hideous jewlery. I received a beautiful album filled with letters my students wrote me. And gift certificates-- American Express Gift Certificates. Like I said: seriously lucky this year! Those gift certificates are totally going to justify the massage I was thinking about getting. I deserve it after all. I just spent a year with twenty three third graders!
One more day.....