better

A productive day always helps.

By way of procrastinating on school work, I got all sorts of house stuff done today. And then after dinner, I buckled down and turned in an assignment in each of my three classes. I was slightly mortified when I got an email from one of my instructors asking me to please not submit a slew of assignments before the midterm. I replied with an apologetic and explanatory note: I've been swamped.

Besides, the rules say you can only submit two assignments at a time, and then you have to wait until they're graded before you can hand in any more. Anyway, I expect to take every single one of my midterms late; I don't think I could possibly hand in all the assignments I need to do before their due dates (5/17 and 5/24, respectively - my first one is already overdue, having been scheduled for 5/3).

If my brain is functioning tomorrow, I'll take my first midterm tomorrow evening. Here's hoping... and I'm off!

messed up

I was supposed to take a mid-term eight days ago. Oops. I didn't realize it because I went a week without logging into my school homepage. Part of that was because I was just fried from work and other stuff going on, and part of that was because my laptop battery was dead and I couldn't juice it up because I left my power cord at my speech therapist's office, and I didn't have a chance to go and get it until Thursday. Oops, again.

This evening I had Guinness with dinner, and fell asleep before 8PM. I slept for at least an hour and a half, if not two hours... and now I'm still up. Oops.

I hate this feeling of having so much work to do, it induces paralysis. My new goal is to get through all my mid-terms before we leave for MA. I'm not sure that's possible. Obviously, it was a mistake to take the job since I was planning on wrapping up the courses entirely before we left. Ha! I haven't even been keeping up with what I'm supposed to be doing, school-wise, never mind accelerating. And now I definitely have to find somewhere to take my exams while we're away this summer, which is something I had hoped to avoid.

Onward.

catching up

I had my talk with the administration, and they said some nice-sounding, even fair-sounding, things, things which may even be true. Still, if you were going to invite someone to a meeting on Thursday, wouldn't you notify them of the meeting some time before Thursday?

My favorite part of the meeting:
Admin: You should talk to me before you get upset.
Me: I am talking to you.

I pushed this a bit, too: has there been any indication, other than the email I sent to you, that I'm upset? Because I would hope that I'm professional in my behavior and would want to know if I haven't been.

"Oh, no, no, nothing like that," they insisted.

Fine.

At one point this week, I got into it with "my" kid, who told me point blank to go away. "I can't," I stated flatly. "It's my job."

"Why do you want this job, anyway?" he asked.

I think I laughed nearly a full minute then, and had to beg off with "It's too complicated to explain," when he wanted to know why I was laughing.

I'm making the best of it.

DH left on Thursday for CT, he's helping his folks around their house. DD got sick Friday night and thereby threw a spanner into the works for the weekend. Today (Saturday) was a wretched day which I refuse to recount in the hope that I might someday soon forget it.

Some days I feel like everything's going well. Today was not one of them. It was a hanging-by-a-thread day, when everything threatened to come apart. It didn't, though, and that's what I have to keep reminding myself.

bait & switch

The new job was supposed to be easy -- second grade teacher's aide. That lasted a couple of weeks, then I got thrown the curveball of the one-one-one work, which was supposed to end today.

Today, of course, I hear my one-on-one kid is going back to his original classroom, and I'm going with him, and that class's aide will be moving into my classroom.

This is wrong on so many levels that I would be fully justified in quitting, but I'm not going to quit (at this point) for a bunch of reasons -- it's only till the end of the year (5 more weeks), and they need someone, and it's good to have steady money.

But, but, but... this isn't what I signed up for, not by a long shot. Being a general aide is easy work and I could leave at the end of the day without having anything too pressing weighing on my mind. One-one-one work is not like that, I find myself replaying various confrontations and thinking about what I could have done differently. It's psychologically draining on a level I haven't experienced in years, and I'm finding it impossible to get back into my schoolwork. (I'm hoping this otherwise-empty weekend will get me back in the groove.)

And another thing? The pay is horrifically bad. Substitute teaching money isn't great, but it's still better than teacher's aide money -- and one-on-one aides get paid at the same rate as regular aides. Now I'm off the table as far as subbing goes, which wasn't part of the original deal, either. I can earn in 3 days subbing what it takes 5 days to earn as an aide, but now I won't have that chance since they can't leave a one-on-one aide-less a couple of days per week.

I'm being taken advantage of, and I know it, and I'm allowing it to happen because they are stuck. What I need to do next week (there was no time at all, today), is meet with the appropriate administrators and tell them these things. I may ask for more money ("hazard pay") but will most likely be told there isn't any, to which I will reply: but what about the funds that were budgeted for the aide for my (original) class, which went unspent for at least 3 or 4 months? I may be able to work something, there.

*whew*

Torchwood has wrapped for the season, and perhaps forever, as there is no word yet on whether there will even be a third season. This is a relief because I really need to get back to my school work.

It feels odd to have actual writing assignments that have nothing to do with 1) science fiction or 2) low carb cooking. I haven't written a low-carb column in about year. I was thinking about it today, wondering, what happened? It feels like one day I just stopped writing, but what really happened is that our computers were stolen, along with all my recipes and my ingredient and recipe databases that I had set up to calculate nutrition information. Apparently, it was too big a loss to overcome, and then other things happened, and it just fell away entirely.

I've been putting off my school work, what with DD's Confirmation and First Communion, and the accompanying houseguests, and my new job, and today, well, the DBacks game (a 9-4 trouncing by the Padres; oh well) and HBO's superlative John Adams. I'm running out of excuses, not to mention time, if I want to finish up these classes before we leave for the summer. I just have to do it.

It's going to take a bit of manning up to actually sit down and write up my "reflections" from my Educational Psychology readings. I'm asked to pinpoint three areas of my teaching ability that I feel need the most improvement, but reading over the expert vs novice teacher matrix, I already feel I'm in the "expert" category on most of them. (Most new teachers haven't lived with my kids; plus, I'm good at this stuff.) I'm sure I'll come up with something.

Torchwood 2.13: Exit Wounds

Given its ratings success, there's every indication that Torchwood will be returning for a third season. But writer-producer Chris Chibnall's superlative "Exit Wounds" is something unexpected: a wholly complete and satisfying episode that could just as easily serve as a series finale as a bridge to the third season.

This episode is one of the finest hours of television you're likely to see. Read the rest over at The House Next Door.

discernment, continued

Have I mentioned I have a new job? Until the end of the school year, I'm working as an aide in second grade, except when they need a substitute. The money for an aide is abysmal, but I do really enjoy being around the kids.

Last week, though, was my first week of two wherein I'm one-on-one with an (as yet undiagnosed) ADHD kid. He could give the Energizer Bunny a run for its money, but in terms of stubbornness and force of will, the kid's a piker compared to DS1 at that age.

In the course of the last week, I've managed to 1) get him to tie his own shoes 2) do all his morning work and 3) quit going to bathroom every single period. I tolerate a lot from him -- he pretty much has to move constantly -- but I don't allow him to disrespect me, and I do make him come back to wherever and try again if he runs in the halls. It all comes down to one thing: I mean what I say. That's the one thing he has to know and really believe about me -- so far, so good. We'll see how next week goes.

In the course of this past week I have received a lot of positive feedback from the rest of the staff. The teacher I'm working with has told me that I have a gift and that I should go into Special Ed instead of secondary. I feel very comfortable working with certain types of kids because I had my trial by fire with DS1, who nowadays is your typical brilliant 11-year-old.

I asked our Special Ed staff (I love them, they're fantastic) how they do it without having to go home and cry every day. It's one thing to work with bright kids with poor impulse control, the way I have been, it's another to work with kids that you know won't be able to progress at all. Even worse? The parents who either cannot or will not engage with their child and his abilities. It hurts to see parents who fundamentally misunderstand their own children, and with learning disabled kids, it's fairly common.

I told my mentor teacher I have no idea what I'm doing right now. I was struck today -- it's Friday, and I had to total my hours for the week -- by what a pittance I'm earning, but at the same time, I was so happy to go to work this morning. I subbed in DS2's first grade class and we had a great time, even though I missed my second graders a bit. I'm not doing this for the money, I'm doing it for the experience.

I'm doing good work. I tell the kids, and I've been telling my Religious Ed class all year, that to really feel good about yourself, you need to do good work. So I'm not surprised by how happy I'm feeling, but I feel a little bit like a freshman invited to the senior prom: I love being in second grade because that's where I am right now. If I were working in middle school, or high school, I'd probably feel the same way, right? Knowing me? Yes.

Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. I need to vary my classroom experiences so I can gage what I can do long-term without burning out. Who knows where I'll end up. I just know I'll be in a school somewhere, hopefully earning a bit more than an aide's hourly wage.

Torchwood 2.12: Fragments

Chris Chibnall puts that old chestnut, your life flashing before your eyes just before you die, to good use in "Fragments," managing to avoid most of the clumsiness inherent in the typical origin story. It doesn't sit well that we're finally learning how Jack (John Barrowman) built his team just as it appears we're about to lose them all. "Fragments" is satisfying in that it answers many questions about our Torchwood Team, but ultimately it suffers from being nothing more than an extended setup for Chibnall's pull-out-the-stops season finale.

Read the rest over at The House Next Door.

Update: The episode's title has been corrected to "Fragments." Ross kindly pointed out that "Fractures" was a Farscape episode, so I didn't make up the other title out of whole cloth! What a week.