I had parent/teacher conferences yesterday. My school day officially began at 7:30 AM and ended at 8:15. It was a long day. I kept track of what happened throughout. Here’s a glimpse into an extra long day-in-the-life of an elementary school teacher.
7:15
It’s -6 degrees when I leave, and a good 45 minutes earlier than I normally would. My first conference isn’t until 7:50, but we’re expected to be there at 7:30 for contractual hours. I want to be there before 7:30 because I know if I’m not, the parking lot at the end of the building right outside my classroom will fill, and walking out to my car at the opposite end of the school at the end of the day will feel like the Bataan Death March.
8:00
I have two morning conferences. Thankfully they’re both great kids and should be easy. I get through the first one relatively easy, even though I have to think through my words deliberately because it doesn’t yet feel like my brain is ready to form ideas, or my mouth is ready to form words properly. I would love to be at home now, having taken out Freddie, both of us having eaten breakfast, and both of us already napping on the sofa to finish up any leftover sleeping we still had to accomplish.
9:06
The safety patrol kids are arriving. Oh no. I forgot it was Dress Like Your Favorite Book Character Day. I mean, I knew it was, and I still choose to wear a school sweatshirt since that seems like something both comfortable and acceptable to wear for a conference day. But having the kids dress like book characters means 1) accomplishing nothing for at least the first 30 minutes of the day, 2) people hoping for, if not demanding, others pay extra attention to them because of their costumes, 3) people making fun of each other’s costumes, 4) people playing with their costumes all day as they slowly come apart, and 5) the extra chaos that comes with adding an x factor into a building already populated by somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 kids.
9:27
A kid walked in with a Star Wars t shirt and a Pokemon sweatshirt for his book characters. I made the mistake of calling him “Pikachu-bacca. It was a mistake because now at least 12 kids are saying it over and over and over, and he’s basking in the attention.
9:50
Somehow a spontaneous argument about whether or not worms are mammals, independent of everything I’m trying to talk about, has started up.
10:27
I’m passing out papers for them to work on finding the areas of parallelograms. I have one more paper in my hand, that needs to go to the girl Tik-Tok dancing three feet away from me. (If you are unfamiliar with Tik-Tok, count your blessings.) “Whenever you manage to finish up your dancing, I’ve got some things for you to do,” I say to her. She takes about fifteen seconds to complete her moves, then takes her papers, completely oblivious to my sarcasm.
11:30
The temperature has gone all the way up to 9 degrees. This means outdoor recess on my day of recess duty. Hoo-ray. I knew there was a reason I wore a hood today. (Let’s not kid ourselves — I wear hoods almost every day. My daily fashion routine approximates what would be commonly seen at a college football game on a Saturday afternoon in October.)
12:04
Recess:
Some extraordinary drama played out as one member of The Crew — our very own collection of disrespectful bullies — was working to separate herself from the others, and oh my, how they were not having any of that. We also had the usual football game was going on, as always, with absolutely no pass rush for some reason. One kid tried to dump his coat on the ground. I negotiated him back up to wearing it with at least the sleeves on. There was a group on the swings in the dead of winter, believe it or not. A group of six girls were saying they were going to follow me the whole time, until they realized I was keeping my playground monitoring to a very small area. Another group of girls had picked up large and seemingly unbreakable pieces of snow, called them their snow babies, and tried to break them by dropping them from the playground bridge. Also, for at least twenty of our thirty minutes, there was a yeti hunt going on. I never heard how that turned out.
Deep snow on the playground
1:21
The kids are working on opinion essays over Google, sending me their work for review and feedback as we go. I actually enjoy this; it gives me some insight into what agents and editors do when they review manuscripts, and even gets me thinking ahead in my writing as I try to anticipate what feedback I might receive from someone as I’m drafting. The topics I’m looking at today: “Why Math is Cool,” “Longer Summer Breaks,” “Why People Should Exercise,” “Climate Change,” and “Electric Cars are Good and People Should Use Them.”
1:45
I’m in the middle of what will prove to be a ten-minute conversation at lunch about how bridesmaids dresses never support boobs properly, and how inconvenient it is. I started in the Elementary Education program at St. Cloud State in my junior year, which means I have been overwhelmingly surrounded by women for some 30-odd years now. Consequently, I have been on the sidelines for conversations such as this so many times I’m numb to them.
2:38
I dropped the class off at the media center, checked my mailbox in the office, and came back to my room. It just occurred to me that even though I’m still stuck in this old brick schoolhouse for close to another six hours, the only Have-Tos on my list are 20 minutes of read aloud, making it through dismissal without a headache, and three conferences. This means I have what amounts to approximately four hours of prep time this evening. I might be able to get out of here on Friday with no work to bring home for the weekend whatsoever. I now have a goal.
5:38
My conferences are done. I’m here for another two and a half hours. I wish I had the stamina and willpower to actually buckle down and write next week’s lesson plans, but I know that won’t happen.
5:45
We’re all so thankful we have a PTO who arranges for us to have dinner on conference nights. Plus we had Texas Roadhouse donate a whole bunch of food. Free food is good. However: I’ve been to Texas Roadhouse twice, and each time I walked out feeling a little ill. But their salad dressing and croutons are amazing. I could have eaten a bag of those croutons like movie theater popcorn. By the time I’d spent 45 minutes in the lounge picking at food and talking with the people coming and going, I felt pretty certain the chances of my planning getting done were next to gone.
7:00
I just realized I still have over an hour to be here. I really could get some things done, and I really tried to. But it became too easy to come up with a question about the schedule that I needed to check with someone else about, which led to roaming the halls looking for the right person or people, which led to talking to other people, which led to a chain reaction of distractions that were all too effective at keeping me away from my plans. By 7:30, I knew I was a lost cause.
8:02
My mind is now incapable of productivity. I did get a good portion of my lesson planning completed, but I’ve also found some great time-filling activities to keep myself occupied: I’ve posted the picture day schedule in the staff work room. I’ve organized my classroom library. I switched out the colors of Sharpies I keep in the pencil holder on my desk instead of the giant Sharpie box hidden away in my desk. I may have occasionally checked Twitter.
8:15
The call is made, and we’re officially released to the wild. Overall it wasn’t a bad day; to be honest, most of them aren’t. I’m lucky I have a class that largely gets along, and even the few kids that occasionally don’t usually keep their obnoxious drama contained to themselves or they save it for lunch and recess when I don’t have to put up with it.
Time to go home and fall asleep on the couch with a dog curled up in my lap.
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