A truly bad day

Goal of the week: organize my filing system! I managed to get all of the student work that was backed up into the student files. That was a task that took me multiple days. Now that I have it all in the student folders, I begin to think to myself - why do I have a folder for each particular student anyway? That means that I have to take the work for each student each night and file it, take it out and grade it, put it back, take it out again and hand it back. I could just be taking it out as a group and grading it and handing it back and keeping the quizzes and tests in the files for safe keeping. Their practice work could be handed back or the files could be for them to keep their stuff in in class if they don't feel they could keep things in their locker. That could work. I'll have to think about it. I know that I graded much faster when I did everything as a class.

Yesterday I took another sick day. That makes the grand total this year at 6. I feel like I've taken too many. I may need to talk to an administrator about the problem. With the stress of the program and me always running around and busy... my migraines have gotten out of control. They are nearly always a problem these days and I'm always medicated. It's horrible. I hate being medicated all of the time. I feel like I'm constantly in a daze. I hate being underslept and constantly tired and feeling exhausted. I don't know how the other people in the program with families handle all of this.

And I really, really hate having a substitute in my room. The sub that I had yesterday didn't follow my directions. I'm having the students do a project over the movie "Journey to the Center of the Earth." They are to point out the scientific differences between the movie and the geologic reality of the center of the Earth in a Venn Diagram and a paper. The sub didn't have them start the movie like I had indicated. Instead, he let the students talk all period and he let them swear and be disrespectful to gay people in my room. I don't tolerate disrespect to any minority group in my room. It's a pet peeve of mine to an extreme degree. School should be a warm and welcoming place to people of every race, creed, gender, sexual orientation, and possible definition. I can't believe that the sub let them do that. A few of my students came to me clearly upset because the sub started "bonding" with some of the jocks in the back of the room and theys tarted throwing around really nasty words. Apparently, they made fun of me as well. I don't really care that much about me. I do care that my students didn't feel comfortable in my room. That has me extremely ticked off. I want to go downtown and make a complaint about that sub so he never works in my district again. He threw off my schedule and made my students feel uncomfortable. That is not allowed.

Perhaps I'm just in a bad mood because I still have a migraine. I don't know. I do know that my students are now behind schedule and I'm angry. I rarely get angry.