Rain.

I love waking up to the rain. It's so calming to sit in bed and listen to the raindrops falling on the street, the cars, the roof of my house. I love seeing how green my lawn is when it stops (even though that means I'll have to mow it again soon).

Training and things have started for me this week, and at first I was feeling like this:




but it turns out it's a blessing in disguise. I'm slowly growing more accustomed to getting up in the morning, without the shock of going straight from sleeping in to getting up at five. And today we picked up lots of goodies on the way out of our meeting!

Cleaning my classroom, clearing the walls, organizing my materials and documents has started to get me back in the mood.

Like the rain makes my mornings gets my day off to a relaxing start and brings life to the plants in my garden, I'm slowly beginning to feel refreshed and energized for a new year. It's going to be a good one.

29

Yesterday, for the first time since summer school (a whole two weeks ago), I walked into my classroom. As always, the engineers had left me a lovely present--a huge pile of furniture on one side of the room. Fortunately the sweet lovely fifth grade teachers came down and helped me move things. So now my room looks all nice and neat again, except the chairs. I'll do those later.

I have mountains of crayons. Literally boxes upon boxes of the things. So many, in fact, that at the end of last year I just got a bunch of plastic bags and told my first graders to go to town and just take them home. That worked out okay until someone took all the crayons at her table and left her little crying friend with an empty bag. I was shocked. Didn't we JUST read Compartimos todo (We Share Everything)? Has Robert Munsch taught you nothing?

Alright, alright. In hindsight, I should have distributed them in a bit more organized way. But I really just needed to make room for the millions of new crayons still sitting in my storage closet. Maybe they'll be prizes or something?

I went to the office to say hello to everyone. I decided (unwisely?) to ask our lovely office lady (what is her title again? I think Queen of Organizational Awesomeness or La reina de la oficina would work) for my class list. I know it's two weeks til school and I might not actually know for sure who I've got til Labor Day, but I just wanted to mentally prepare myself for what I'm going to get. And what I got was

29.

I know that for some of you, this is nothing. For some of you, you've had 30 or more before. But I saw that number and I'm pretty sure my hair stood on end.

29! My first year in first grade two years ago, I had 26. And I'm pretty sure that by November I only had 3 strands of hair left. (I've been wearing a wig ever since...shhhhh don't tell my kids!) Granted, those little darlings went on to second grade and bring joy to their new teacher's lives (and by that I mean they are all wearing wigs now, too. We look FABULOUS). 

Que Dios me de gracia, paciencia y fuerza...

So while I was bouncing with excitement (read: wallowing in my misery) at the news, I took a look at the class lists for the two fifth grade teachers--32 and 32. At first I thought, Meh, you have big kids...you'll be fine. And then I remembered that one is a first year teacher and one is a second year teacher.

Ouch.

I think this year will require lots of support (read: trips to happy hour).

Superteachers?

This video is amazing. Some great encouragement for this year -- let it make you!


The Myth of the Super Teacher from EdWriters on Vimeo.