Ten Weeks Down.

I have reached the point of the year where I am so stressed out I don't sleep very well and would consider taking a mental health day except I am too busy to actually take one.

I am in favor of teachers - well, every worker, but especially teachers - taking a mental health day.  Underslept, overstressed teachers are grumpy, and grumpiness is not good for classroom community and management.  The job is so emotionally demanding that recharging is a necessity, not a convenience.

Luckily for me, the constant business keeps the grumpiness in check, since I like varied and changing environments.  Also, I used parent-teacher conferences to get the next three permission slips signed, so the big ARGH source of Paper Management and Control has been mitigated.

Anyway, we have two field trips next week.  One of these is a school-wide service event for which I am a primary planner.  The week after we have another field trip.  I did all of my conferences except one (child out sick) this last week.  I am helping the New Resident finish her first big series of observations/write ups, have a wedding to attend, need to plan for Thanksgiving and deal with some family health issues.  Also, I skipped a doctors' appointment this week and need to stop doing that.  However, I am tired of hearing words like autoimmune and rheumatoid and needed a holiday from that.

Conferences went very well.  Nothing I said was met with shock, which is good: my understanding of the child being discussed was in tune with the parents.  The kids report liking school and everyone is making good growth.  I had zero no-shows, although I had some problems getting scheduled translators to actually appear.  This is especially irritating for me when they are paid SFUSD employees for whom this is part of their job.  But in the end I did have a translator for every conference that needed one.

I made it 47 school days before I repeated an outfit.  I did not feel like wearing an evening gown on the day of Jump Rope for Heart - I changed to jump anyway, but dealing with an internally-boned dress in the confines of a bathroom stall was just more than I was willing to take on.

I've been thinking a lot about teacher impact on a classroom.  It's important that I'm not grumpy, because when I am a fine fog of irritation fills the classroom.  Still, not all lesson failures or bad transitions are teacher-caused: child mood is important, too, and sometimes things just go wrong.  According to this very famous graph, teachers are at their lowest around now, and a couple of my colleagues are feeling very hard on themselves.  Anyway, I plan to pontificate about this later.