Fall Break in Indiana is a 4-day weekend that used to be reserved for statewide teacher workshops. No one does that anymore. We just have four days off during a pretty time of the year, but since it comes directly after the end of the first grading period--and parent conferences--I think people just fall into a dead heap!
I went in to school a few minutes early on Tuesday thinking that I would get the jump on getting my grades in, since the software failure of the day before. The computer dude met me in the hall and informed me that it wasn't fixed yet. He had logged onto my computer as him--a system administrator--just so I could enter my grades. But there was still one grade book/class that even he couldn't seem to make work. At issue is the fact that I take two grades: spelling and language arts. Spelling is only 20% of the overall grade; language arts is 80%. I had to set the categories by weight, then go back and tell each assignment what weight it carried. One grade book was okay because it doesn't have assignments that carry different weights. The IT guy and one of the school secretaries were going to work on the one class that "we" couldn't do while I worked on the other four. I got my part done within two class periods. Andrew (the IT guy) came in and asked me to verify the weight categories for the assignments for the class they were working on. FINALLY, it all seemed to get done, and they could go print everything out for the 8th grade. (Parent conferences were to begin at noon. There was no time to spare!!) I breathed a sigh of relief, but still had to write conference notes for every kid that isn't in my homeroom, to give to my other team members, just so they could talk to the parents about how Johnny or Susie was doing in the other classes. That is approximately 95 papers...and I hadn't even started because I couldn't put the kids' grades on the papers until they were entered into the computer, which I couldn't get done until just before!!! (Are you confused, yet?) I spent the next hour or more working on those. Got them done just as parents were beginning to arrive. Whew!
I was handed a stack of report cards for my homeroom students to give to conference parents. Then I was told that the grades for social studies were wrong, so I was given a correction sheet. Then, a number of people who were rushing around trying to get things taken care of, managed to fix the glitch that had those grades wrong, and I was given a corrected stack of reports. I unstapled the incorrect ones from the required meningitis letter that was attached, pitched them, and stapled the corrected ones on. Then I went through the conference notes from the other three core subject teachers and stapled them together just so I wouldn't have to waste time rifling through papers when parents were there. That made me a pretty expensive paper-shuffler! A trained monkey could have done it...
One of the things I noticed in my own last-minute grade deal was that a number of the final grades for my classes were quite low--even for the accelerated class. As expected, my phone and email box lit up on Wednesday after conferences. Parents wanted to know why. Shortly before my prep period on Wednesday--AFTER conferences--I noticed that three grade columns for each class were marked "language arts" (80%) when they clearly should have been marked "spelling" (20%). All of my final grades were incorrectly calculated!!!!! Arrrgggghhhh!
I went immediately to Andrew to explain my problem, then to the principal. Andrew got on the phone with the software company (again) because it seems that only they can "unfinalize" a grade book--which is stupid. The principal just told me to get a corrected report card and write a cover letter to parents. By the time I left on Wednesday, Andrew said that the reports were corrected. On Monday, we will issue new reports..and I will beg parents to forgive the inconvenience!
Today...my first day of Fall Break...I spent it doing laundry. Six loads of laundry and one load of dishes. We took Meg's car to the repair shop last night to get the heater core replaced. That meant I had to take the children to day care and her to work. The rest of the day, I spent doing endless laundry. Six loads? Plus a load of dishes. And at the end of the day--when I went to pick up the children and Meg--you couldn't tell that I had done anything!! I don't know where all of the money is coming from to do everything there is to do, but we just keep pluggin'.
This weekend is Ryan's turn to be with Daddy, and Robin will stay here. We'll watch the weather and try to go to the zoo with her, etc. We had a Skywarn net tonight, but not much materialized in Hendricks County. Okay with me!!
I know how vain this sounds, but I can't get my hair to do anything around the craniotomy scar. It's been a couple of months since I had a haircut, so I am going to get a cut tomorrow and hope that it helps. The plain truth is that I didn't have much hair to begin with, and then the operation carved a bunch of it out at a critical area of my head where my hairdo is concerned. It has essentially deteriorated my self-image. I understand that I am the luckiest person in the world to be alive and kicking after a ruptured aneurysm. I understand that God didn't give me much to work with in the looks department. I have tried to work around that for years. But this is just demoralizing! The only scars I have on my whole body are on my face and head. That's not fair!
Okay...so after the pity party, I'll just go to bed. More laundry tomorrow. Stuff happens!