Apparently this is spammity spam spam from Spamalot.  Grr.

This blog will be completely quiet during the school day today (8 AM-4 PM local time).

This is weird. But in a good way.

I picked up a science/reading activity book at Learning Palace today, for tomorrow’s lesson (side note: I really must start planning these things further in advance so that I’ll have a better window in which to get copies). I think this is one of my favorite resources ever.

Here’s what’s odd…I just realized that I’m really having fun planning tomorrow’s lesson, and that it had been a while.

As further evidence of the strangeness of humanity, I present…printed toast. All I have to say is, if a guy ever manages to put up with me for long enough that it leads to toasters, I want one that’ll do this kind of thing.

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Legal notice: Creative Commons license does not apply to the above picture.

(a follow-up from this entry)

Apparently this isn’t spam:

Even though this is:

I’m not worried about “them” monitoring my e-mail. If they were doing that, they’d do a better job of it.

Explain this to me.  2-hour math test, reporting time is 10:45 so I get there a bit before 10:30 because according to ETS “it’s really really really important to be on-time.”  Got in the door late, 11:15ish. Got to room.  Filled out form.  And waited…waited…waited…waited as other people filled out their forms. I mean, I expected to be one of the first done since I got it first, but people needed help figuring it out.  As I muttered to the random guy in front of me, “how are people supposed to take the test if they’re having trouble writing their names?”

We got started at 11:40.  And then, at the end…people couldn’t figure out how to follow the directions to turn in their stuff, so I didn’t know how messed up mine had gotten in the shuffling, so I stuck around to double-check with the proctor because I do NOT have time for procesing delays.  So…a 2-hour test monopolized my time from 10:45 to 2.  Grr.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I’m sure I passed.  The cut score isn’t that high, and I know I did really well on the multiple choice.  The essay part, harder to call, but I know I didn’t do that badly.  Mediocre on the essays plus really good on the multiple choice will break the cut score.

So, that’s done.

I think it went all right…can’t guarantee I got it, because there’s one position and I don’t know how the applicant pool is, but if I didn’t, it was a matter of the competition. I can live with that. And…it’s possible I was reading it wrong, since I’m still learning administratorese and I’ve been exposed, mostly, to the Oregon dialect…but I think she may have been trying to sell me on it, toward the end.

Anyway…yeah. Need to talk to the Arizona Department of Education, about how to make this legal. But I think I’ll be OK one way or another.

Yesterday, my observation didn’t go great.  Not horrible…I got a usable writeup about it…but then my cooperating teacher and my advisor went into this huge thing about how I’m not functioning on the level they expected.  Apparently I’m “disconnected” and my enthusiasm has tapered off from the beginning of the year…

It’s not complicated.  I’m tired from 5 hours being an average night (the other night, I had a chance for almost 8 uninterrupted hours–spontaneously woke up and interrupted it, six and a half hours in).  I’m fighting depression off again because of the lack of sleep and the pressure of having to not screw it up now when I’m this close.  I’m feeling overwhelmed by having to get all the finishing-up stuff right in such a tight timetable to be able to teach in the district that wants me.

I’m running out of energy even for myself.  I’m dragging myself through because it’s almost over.  Yeah, I’m less enthusiastic, it’s called being dead tired.

They made useful comments like “you’ve got to take care of yourself.”  There’s only so much time in the day and almost every minute goes toward school–or at least trying to do school stuff, I’m so scattered that I fall into other things and don’t even realize it–I just can’t imagine being able to fit anything else in, since for anything that goes in something’s got to fall out.  If I had an hour a day for “me time” I’d sleep more.

They said that they wouldn’t be surprised if I were to break down and cry, that in fact they’d be more surprised if I hadn’t up to that point.  Now, there were a few tears, but “cry” is a strong word…I felt like it…I’ve felt like it before…but…yeah, I’m controlled.  I will not break. For all I know that’s part of the problem, but it just is what it is.  I’ve already used my quota of crying as a student.  Couldn’t explain that; they know, to some extent, since I couldn’t keep the whole thing a secret, but almost no one knows how much that still gets to me, so when they asked if I knew what was wrong, I just couldn’t come up with anything that was true and let me keep trying not to talk about it.

Dangit, my throat’s sore again now, from thinking about it.  Something in me still tries to say I can’t do it.  Ridiculous…I know I can do it, I just have to drag myself through this, get to it.  But it’s there, it’s a thought in my head, I can’t make it go away even though I refuse to give in to it.  So it makes every day a struggle and I don’t know how to change that.

And they asked what they could do to help.  The thing is, there just isn’t a whole lot anyone can do, unless they can make my life make sense, put an extra four hours in each day so that I can sleep and breathe, and cook and clean for me so I don’t have to think about that stuff.  I’m not from a teaching family, I’m not even from a normal family, no one gets it and almost no one even knows how to listen.  I’ve got pretty much no one outside of school to bounce stuff off of or to look to for an example.

So, I’m fitting in a doctor’s appointment on Friday, to rule out physical causes, since they said I should do that.  I doubt it’s anything that’ll show up in that sort of thing, it’s that I haven’t had a term off since 2001 and have been running up a sleep debt since sophomore year and deliberately made it worse in spring of junior year.  I doubt they have a pill for that.  But, whatever.

The darned thing filtered a message from a principal in the district I’ve signed a letter of intent for, in which she was trying to set up a phone interview…Microsoft is lucky I check the spam folder instead of just trashing it.  Gross Viagra ads get through just fine, but a principal trying to maybe give me a job, “oh noes!”

Kids do the darnedest things to computers. Like rotate the monitor display…I spent 15 minutes mucking about in monitor settings, until I got sort of frustrated, Googled, and came up with this. Turned out to be the graphics card setting thing. Googled from my laptop, ’cause it’s really hard to use a mouse at a 270 degree rotation.

I just wonder if it was an accident or deliberate. If it was an accident, the kid undoubtedly just freaked out…if it was deliberate, well, that’s relatively funny as harmless pranks go…