The busiest week all year.

I have to be at work every day at 7:00AM. School starts at 7:35. There are kids in desks in my room by 7:15AM. If I am doing a lab or something that needs setting up before the kids come, then I have to be at work around 6:30 or earlier. That gives a context to this crazy week.

Friday, October 12
Substitute teacher- I am pulled out of the classroom to do IB curriculum writing all day in the library.

Saturday, October 13
Future MIL comes from Louisiana and spends all day with Ed and me at my house. This was the first time she had ever been to my house. I cleaned all morning, but let's face it... it wasn't that dirty.

Sunday, October 14
Mom and I drive to Dallas to go to Ed's church and we eat at the KofC hall afterward. I get home around 4PM because we decided to shop a bit after lunch.

Monday, October 15
Benchmark testing - No teaching gets done; kids take over an hour to do the test. Shahveer and I finish the campus-wide science TAKS tidbits that we have been working on for weeks.

Tuesday, October 16
Ditto Monday; tutoring after school and don't get home until 5:00PM (school's dismissed at 2:45)

Wednesday, October 17
PSAT testing; now they take away half of a school-day to do this. We must accomodate. Used to, if a kid wanted to take this optional test, they had to pay and go to school on a Saturday. Now it's free and during school hours. Classes are half as long as normal. We grade some papers, but no teaching gets done.
During the testing, we science teachers are in meetings for the rest of the day. I win my post as TEEG representative. (Texas Educators Excellence Grant) I guess that means I can't get the grant money because of conflict of interest.

Thursday, October 18
Substitute teacher - I get pulled out again. This time, I am sent to Pre-Advanced Placement vertical alignment training. "Laying the Foundations". All day. I leave training early to go tutor after school at my campus. I stay at tutoring until 4:45PM. Get home around 5:20PM; My college class at night starts at 6PM. I get to that class about 4 minutes late after gobbling down some fast food. Next week we have our mid-term and I haven't cracked the book all semester. Tonight was the first night I opened the book.

Friday, October 19
The first "normal" day since last Thursday a week ago, and I decide to do a lab. That means I am at work by 6:20AM; During my conference period, I drive home and get clothes to take to the cleaners; All the edits are finished for the TAKS tidbits. Shahveer and I work on the final touches and edit-out 15 days of review pages; After work I go to the Texans for Life office and work there until 11PM on banquet preparations.

Saturday, October 20
I have to be at the hotel in Dallas for the banquet by 3:00PM. I am in charge of setting up the huge display and laying out the nametags, items for sale, etc....; the banquet reception starts at 6PM, and the banquet won't be done until about 10PM. I will be up there until midnight I am sure.

TIME TO PONDER HOW INCREDIBLY DIVERSE IT IS TO BE A TEACHER. Never boring, never the same and you must be a skilled multi-tasker.

Each week there are exactly 1305 minutes of instruction time between all my classes. Because of training, testing and all that jazz, I actually spent about 516 minutes total with my students during instructional time this week.

That's only 40% of the time teaching that I normally spend. And since we are on a block schedule, I only see the same kids every other school day.

And they wonder why TAKS scores are low.

Now, consider that that 516 minutes were divided between 12 class periods (the 12 that I was actually in the room with them - --not Thursday because that was a sub day).

That makes 129 minutes with each of my A-Day classes and 43 minutes with each of my B-Day classes for the whole week... Because the day I was pulled out (Thursday) was a B-Day.

Normally, I would have had 216 minutes with each of my A-Day classes and 174 minutes with each of my B-Day classes.