closing night

Drama is drama, and that is all I can say. I do really love the kids--they're a lot of fun. But there are always plenty of tears and plenty of irritations and short tempers, etc. I am patiently waiting for the word to hear whether or not I am taking a lead role in the program for the winter season. The spring will probably remain up in the air--one at a time--but I am anxious to get started, have auditions, pick the play. I'd also like to start Drama Boosters as we've got a lot of great parents. It seems if I can get that started, it won't be so difficult to have a call for help with the parents for each season.

Otherwise, school is going well. I am more or less caught up in grading, though I do have some miscellaneous late and absent work I need to grade. I have parents emailing me about missing assignments that little so-and-so already turned in, and I just want to say--"What did parents do before we posted grades online?" The kids actually became responsible for making sure things were updated. And despite all of it, I still have to post grades in the classroom to get kids worried about missing work and grades that are slumping. After the unit test and the research paper in both of my preps, all grades went down. I kind of feel like the grades had been fairly padded before anyway, so I'm not surprised that they went down, but the average for my 5th hour class is a bit horrifying. Of course, nearly half didn't turn in a major assignment. Whew.

Oh, and yesterday I briefly did something that isn't related to my job--A and L came up for some shopping in our humble town, and we had lunch. I had just woken up after sleeping for one hundred hours (more or less), so I was pretty out of it, but it was nice to step out of the education world for a while. I'm beginning to get the sense that when the school year is on, my social life is off. Which is OK. I have summers, I suppose. It's just that normal people get evenings and weekends, and I won't really have that, especially with drama. So normal people have regular periods of time for recovery, and we have summers. I'm not sure which is better, but I'm darn sick of people saying that teachers don't work hard enough because they have summers off and are done by three, etc. We are most certainly never done at three, and most of us deserve those summers! I'm not saying all teachers are created equal. I think English teachers have a tougher grading load with all those essays than a gym teacher, but we also don't have to deal with energy in the same way that a gym teacher might have to... Anyway, enough pontificating on how hard a teacher works. I know this and most readers of this blog know it.

I need to get going--our closing "night" is really a matinee!