I woke up this morning not feeling well. I was more tired than usual last night but it was a Thursday and our weeks seem forever long with all that’s going on, so I hadn’t given it much thought. I have sub plans at the ready for the next couple of weeks, but getting subs on Fridays in spring is always difficult and I figured we were already going to be short-staffed and I really do want to save my sick days for James’ appointments, and tired is no excuse or none of use would ever show up, so somehow I convinced myself that going in was the best option.
I was right about being short-staffed as an email went around shortly after I arrived at school informing us that P.E. was canceled for the day as the teacher was needed in a classroom. This is the curse for all teachers who have gym on Fridays and I should have been more cognizant that “short-staffed” would also mean I wouldn’t get any planning time today, but until the email arrived the thought hadn’t registered. While an extra 35 minutes is a godsend at times, I want to keep my lesson plans at the ready. I didn’t want to get off-track and have to redo weeks of plans, so it wasn’t as easy of a fix as it might have been otherwise. But it was a solvable problem for sure.
My co-teacher was gone for the day, which I had known about ahead of time. Her substitute is wonderful, but she likes to visit and chat and I had much to do before school to get ready for my day. By nine o’clock, I was already feeling somehow behind, blaming it mostly on my very cloudy head. I had provided feedback to students on some work they had done that week and my morning consisted of many one-on-ones as students asked questions and I clarified and followed-up with those needing more help.
Fridays also mean spelling tests and a new vocabulary assessment I am trying out and students are eager to see their scores and feedback, so I was frantically grading those in between assisting students. It all felt rushed and almost thoughtless as I graded while answering questions and helping students, but I wasn’t sure how else to get them back without my usual planning time to grade. I did the best I could and hoped the kids would forgive my divided attention and lack of small group work for the day.
By lunch I felt like I was drowning. Trying to stay ahead on sub/lesson plans “just in case,” I had been able to get copies made earlier in the week for plans three weeks from now, but I hadn’t been able to get them organized and in the drawer. It had been my plan to reduce the stacks of paper on my classroom counter during lunch, but by this point I was feeling completely drained and all I wanted to do was turn off the lights and sleep.
After lunch, I teach writing with my morning kids and we were finishing up work on a piece we were completing together. I’ve had the kids drafting in Google docs for the past couple of months (to help get them acclimated to the expectations of state testing,) and we were just finishing our last couple of paragraphs, focusing on adding textural evidence when one of my students brought her Chromebook to me with an issue. It seems she had somehow inadvertently turned on special characters and so when she tried to type a quotation mark followed by a capital A, Google Docs changed it to Ä. I spent a couple quick minutes trying to troubleshoot the problem, but I couldn’t find a quick or obvious solution. I sent her back to her seat telling her to just skip the quotation marks for the moment and I would see what I could figure out. Since this was a guided writing, the whole class was waiting for me and I didn’t want to hold all of them up to keep researching. We continued working on the paragraph as a class, while I moved back and forth from modeling my Google Doc to looking up umlaut solutions on my phone. All to no avail.
Before we switched classes for the afternoon, one of my girls pulled me aside to say she’s really lost on the writing we are doing. It was a huge step for her to even admit such and I found myself wanting to jump through every imaginable hoop out there to help her, but I quickly realized I wouldn’t have any more time with her today and so the immediacy of her need was met with a promise to help on Monday. A promise that felt disappointing even to me as I said it.
The afternoon was much like the morning, with more papers to grade, more feedback to provide and more questions to help students navigate. My Post-It notes had Post-It notes of their own by 2 o’clock, and the stacks of plans on my counter just kept getting shoved more and more out of the way as the pile of additional papers and resources grew.
Then, the resource room teacher called to ask me about ELA goals. She was finishing up paperwork for the IEP we had just conducted the day before and wanted to get some ideas from me on work completion goals. She apologized profusely for interrupting me and I knew she was just trying to be timely with the paperwork, but I was in the middle of teaching and had no idea how to even begin to answer her questions. I promised to get back to her by the end of the day, but even as I said as much I wasn’t sure how that would happen without any breaks in my afternoon.
Near the end of the day, the student whose IEP we were finalizing reminded me she was expecting to take a packet of paperwork home with her. She was concerned because she didn’t have it yet and the day was drawing to a close. I shared with her that it wasn’t the resource teacher who was at fault, but that she was waiting on my input and I hadn’t gotten it to her yet. I took the nudge and tried my best to focus on creating work completion goals, but I couldn’t figure out how to even begin such a task. This student doesn’t really struggle with work completion, and I wasn’t sure if the goals were for individual work or with assistance. I had more questions than answers and yet the clock was ticking for this Friday afternoon.
By the time the bell rang and I sent the kids out the door with squirts of sanitizer, I was feeling like I had failed far more than succeeded. I never did get the goals figured out and so that paperwork was going to have to wait until at least Monday. I had a list of four kids (that could easily have been doubled) that needed parent follow-ups, some of which were long overdue, and I had made zero progress on my lesson plans, so my counter and work space looked like a disaster zone. All I wanted to do was go home and sleep, but I knew I had much work to do before I could leave.
Even as I started straightening up the classroom, the sub from across the hall stopped in once more and wanted to chat. She is an “old school” teacher and was lamenting about the lack of attention that students “today” have. It was a concept I readily agree with, but which warrants a much longer conversation than I was prepared to have in the moment. I just wanted to finish my tasks and get out the door.
I wanted to call the parents on my list but my voice was all but gone, so I composed emails, triple checking to make sure the tone didn’t convey my overall tiredness, but was focused on the persistent behaviors I needed help addressing.
I sent the last of the copies I needed for the upcoming lesson plans to the printer and started gathering those materials and getting them stacked and put in my cabinets in case I need a sub for any of those days.
I saw the resource teacher and apologized profusely for not getting the information to her. She was very gracious and understanding, but even when I promised to get it to her on Monday, I really had no idea how I would be any better equipped to address the question then. I would talk with my colleague and see if she could help me formulate the necessary goals somehow.
And when finally I was able to walk out the door, when the building was all but deserted, I breathed a sigh of relief that the counter was ready with Monday’s plans, and the drawers were filled with plans for the next three weeks, and even with state testing next week, I was as ready as I could be.
It was then, as I turned off the lights that I realized I still hadn’t solved the umlaut issue. I still had a student who needed tech help I wasn’t sure how to solve and I was sure it was arise again the next time we worked in Docs as closing out and opening the document again hadn’t relieved the problem.
And I still had a beautiful child who had asked for help with her writing and I had not been able to give it to her. Not yet, I told myself. I hadn’t helped her yet. I walked back to my counter and left myself a Post-It note. “Umlaut” it says. I will solve the umlaut on Monday.
Teaching at 3am 