I Got Work to Do (I Got Work to Do)

There's this song that plays at Ruby Tuesday that is all about how much work this man needs to do and why it's an acceptable excuse to not be with his family. It's an upbeat, repetitive song that makes me want to kick something every time I hear it. This reaction occurs for multiple reasons. The first and foremost being that I find the character in the song to be a complete bag of bad words for putting career before family. Some things are worth sacrificing. Love and relationship comes before all else. Maybe today's culture finds me to be fantastical and absurd for this belief, but I stand by it. Second, I hear the words "I got work to do" and I want to storm through the restaurant and throw everyone out the door because I'm sick of always having to do work myself. Last night, in fact, I had run into a bit of a situation at the end of the school day when I realized I'd spent two hours working on lesson plans for a book that was a level too low for my reading group and was going to have to start all over, but I had to go work at Ruby's. I was thrilled. Sarcasm.

I have plenty of lessons to plan, which is exciting in its own way. However, I find Pippi Longstocking a very difficult story to teach. It's outrageous in its exaggeration and I can't find the base of the stories to show what is being exaggerated. I have to teach an "autobiography" because it was the book I grabbed in my rush to grab a new book for my other group, so there's no going back. It's just an accumulation of stories. Roald Dahl, the author, is well loved for his books and he got all of his ideas from his own life. Now I've found that one of the two students has never read on of his books before. Great. Now it's going to be very difficult to help him make connections to Dahl's other works. Super.

I also have to re-teach division with a group that is very diverse in their division abilities. Chaos abounds in that room, whatever room we're in. I never know what room we're going to end up in from day to day which doesn't help the situation at all. We're most likely going to be in a different room every day unless I can get the fourth grade teachers' permission to move around some furniture in the empty forth grade room to meet my needs for that class. That would be ideal.

I have to set up a time to meet with Prof Cox as well to try to rearrange reading groups. And I need to find a way to set up success time to meet the range of students. I also just found out that I was supposed to be somewhere to cover a class at 3:00. The note for this was lost in this mess. This is just fantastic. It's going to be a lot of work trying to get all of this sorted out and to get a system set in place. I already feel like I'm struggling to keep up since school is in full swing, being halfway through the year, and being in the middle of all these lessons I've had to pick up. I kind of want to bang my head against this table until my brains fall out.

I feel completely inadequate so often. So I'm going to go home, warm up some spaghetti, and do some magic. That's literally what I feel like I need to be able to do: magic. This is just so super awesome! It's discouraging when I can't see the results of my labor. I have to organize and keep up with all of the book reading Randy wants me to do as well. That's going to have me going crazy too most likely.

Well, spaghetti and lesson plans, here I come!