First Week, and Now the Adjustments!

It's Thursday, August 31, and I'm glad to see the end of the week. It's been a good one, but getting back into routine takes time, and I don't mind the four-day-week start. The long weekend (we have both Friday and Monday off) will be busy enough: drain the pool and put it away, might go on a short adventure with Meg and Holly, the usual house chores, reading at church on Sunday, and I'm scheduled to get a Covid vax booster. I'm glad I have not assigned a lot of work to grade-- who has time? =)

I'm sure most of my students will be heading to the fair up in Lancaster--it's a huge draw. We went to the smaller one in Lyndonville, and at the price of fried dough, that's enough for me (can you believe 8.00?)-- the midway lost its appeal for me a long, long time ago, and I can't walk the uneven ground as well as I used to. It's too noisy, dusty, or --in the case of this year-- wet. 

The weather forecast for the weekend beckons me to the deck, too-- high 70s and sunny. Where was that a month ago? sigh. I'm going to soak up as much sunshine as I can-- "Vitamin D therapy" and a little suntan would go a long way towards making me content. 

But then, next week, albeit another short one, we'll get into the rhythm of things. Students are starting to see how we do what we do in my classes. We are making some inroads into subject matter and relationship-building. There will be school photos on Wednesday. It's good to have this long weekend, though, so we can all process what we've done this week, and make the fine adjustments needed to be more efficient.

Speaking of adjustments, I just had to order a new plan/grade book. The one I got is stupid. There's really no other way to put it-- not enough planning pages, the calendars interspersed don't match up with the number of weeks, etc. It's unwieldy. I bought it because I liked the cover art, but it is impractical at best. It's too late to return it (and I've written in it), but I'm not putting any more plans in it-- the new one should be here tomorrow. I hope it's more trustworthy. Yes, I still keep a physical plan book and record book-- I know so many teachers rely entirely on the Power School platform, but not I. I want to flip a page and have the info I need without having to go through the login stuff and so on. My plan book is portable; I don't always have a laptop around. I enter all the grades and so on as we are required to do; it is handy because it tabulates grades and gives parents a place to keep an eye on their kids' progress without blowing up my email. But I like to have the intentional redundancy. 

I also ordered another new pair of shoes, after sending my first-day-back shoes back to the company. They were awful. Cute, but too long, and they hurt. With my problematic feet, shoes are hard to find that don't hurt, but these were a management problem, and by the end of the day, I was really in pain. So, there's that adjustment needed, as well. 

Next week is a new week, and I'm sure there will be more fine-tuning. That said, I'm glad to have made it through this week--almost-- we still have today to get through, and it should be fine. 

Have a good day,

C