Crazy Busy Work Week #178

It's hard to believe, but I've been doing precious little but working and sleeping since the last time I posted. My week imploded on Tuesday. After a day of meetings and classes, I was working on getting my evaluations finished before I left for night school. I had just gotten my last comments written, mail merged the whole stack of them and printed 126 individualized report cards from the printer in the library around 4:30 PM. I was out the door on my way to class about a half hour later, arriving at Pace just after 5:30.

It was as I sat into my seat in class that I had the sinking feeling that I was forgetting something. Our prof was sitting in the seats with the rest of the class. There were presentations to give today. I was one of them. I had absolutely and completely forgotten about it. I was supposed to give a lesson that showed my techniques for differentiating instruction and I didn’t have a damn thing prepared. No handouts, no notes, no tangible objects to utilize in the course of a lesson. I was screwed.

My mind was racing as the first student presented his lesson. He was using “Lord of the Flies” and talking about savagery versus civilization. I was frantically scouring the deep recesses of my brain for a way to use the things I had on me to develop a coherent, differentiated lesson. Though I was mentally attempting to pull such a thing completely out of my ass in the five minutes before I was supposed to present, it couldn’t look like I had just done so. I had no props, so a lesson on rocks or anything else requiring a visual aid was out of the question. I did a quick inventory: I had my wits, the room’s dry erase board, my laptop, a stack of ungraded quizzes, two pens, a trench coat and an umbrella at my disposal. From this mostly useless assortment of items, I was supposed to fashion a lesson on Earth Science.

When my turn came, I grabbed my umbrella and headed to the dry erase board. It was time for my old standby: observation and inference. It’s one of the easiest lessons I’ve got in my repertoire, and perhaps the best one for discussion and group work with low-skilled students. I hung the umbrella from the top of the board and wrote, “What is this, and how do you know?” next to it. From there I was able to lead a discussion that wandered around the issues of how we know what we know about anything and led me to the salient points of my freshly improvised lesson.

Afterwards, my prof complimented my lesson, saying that there was little for a student to have to write or read, which made it accessible to all ability levels. This lack of reading material correlated highly with my lack of handouts or supplies of any kind. The class ended and I joined Bayside and Leonardo in a celebratory pint, since we have but three class sessions remaining.

Wednesday was the first time we were attempting to take the 10th grade to gym. Yes, it’s mid-November and they’ve just had their first gym class. If I were a parent of an MVA student, I’d certainly be calling the Board of Ed to complain. Ahem. In any case, we managed to squeeze 130 bodies into three buses and made our way down to Chelsea Piers, which actually have the perfect facilities for our kids and have a competent staff that can provide actual athletic instruction. What a concept.

Lest I began thinking that the day wasn’t going to be all that bad, one of our students twisted her ankle and I had to stay behind and make sure that her parents were called, emergency room visits were officially declined and that she was able to hobble out the door.

Thursday had me in school from 7:45 AM to 8:30 PM. Five classes to teach and ten Parent-Teacher conferences to host didn’t leave me feeling particularly happy. The only redeeming factor of the whole day was that every single one of my appointments showed up, so though I was busy for virtually the whole time, at least I don’t have to go track down any parents next week.

Friday was a half-day, so I showed Mythbusters in class rather than get two sections a day ahead of the rest of the grade. Then it was an afternoon full of more conferences, which thankfully ended by 4 PM. After work, virtually the whole staff was ready to leap out of the doors, and most of us headed to get a drink or five. Tex arrived at the bar when she left her respective place of business, and we headed for our dinner reservations at an Indian place nearby. We closed out the evening with a bottle of sake at a Japanese bar/restaurant that we chanced upon as we were walking around the neighborhood.

With a week such as this, I spent most of today doing as little as humanly possible. I watched football, I played my piano for the first time in weeks, I ordered takeout, I played video games. No school work, no chores, no nothing. And in a few hours, I’m going to go drinking with the theatre boys. We need to give BourbonSamurai a good send-off, because apparently he’s going to be appearing in “Tamburlaine” in DC for the next six weeks or so. Tomorrow, I have quizzes to grade, a test to write, a paper to review, laundry to do and crazy batshit football to play. But for tonight, there is only the drinking.