I was wondering earlier how English teachers with freakin CHILDREN cope.

Um... I don't know but there are times that I'm pretty sure I'm not doing a good job at either.

I do better, actually, when I teach all new books -- last year I taught stuff I knew and was like, YAWN. This year, I've taught some stuff I know plus Invisible Man (which I hadn't read before), Jane Eyre and Importance of Being Earnest (which I read in high school) and now Love in the Time of Cholera (which I hadn't read since college).

My thing is the shear amount of writing I assign. Since we ave 6 weeks until AP, I will assign two in-class essays each week until the big test. Plus 2 or 3 out of classroom assignments during that period.

Not to mention the research papers I do in my expository class.

God, Kat. That's crazy writin'.

We should all really, really come up with a list of books we teach, rubrics, etc, and share on Google docs.

You know, in our copious free time.

Well, I don't comment anymore on in-class essays. It's all practice all the time. If they are getting low grades, they should come and see me and I'll walk them through it.

AP readers spend approximately one minute on each essay and ICE echo that at this time of the year. The work is necessary for them, but the feedback isn't so important at this point. The experience of working with the prompts is what matters.

Erin, join the AP listserv (the EDG) and there is a ton of sharing of resources etc. And a lot of shit too, because a bunch of English teachers online = verbosity.

I'm ready to go to work! Except my ride won't come until 9ish. Uhg.

Perkins is there a time today I can call or IM with you about the bugs?

Thanks for the encouragement people.

Suzi, glad you got it, sorry I forgot to include a note.

Jesse, there is a to-do list and I am ignoring it. I may need to up meds to get me out of this, not sure.

Sounds like it couldn't hurt, really. I mean, right?

Perkins, do you sleep with clothes on? Because if you do, you'd generally see bedbug bites on your arms, neck and other exposed areas.

Also, bedbug bites often appear in groups of three in a line ("breakfast, lunch and dinner") as a single bedbug often will bite more than once in a night.

A friend of mine was told by pest control people she had bedbugs. Her house was treated. For months afterwards she thought she was still getting bitten, despite the fact we couldn't find any other evidence of the little bastards. Finally she saw a dermatologist, who told her the marks on her skin were not bug bites, but some sort of skin condition.

Urp. Performance review coming up. Wish me luck.

You will rock, Brenda.

Good luck Brenda!

We got the construction mess cleaned up and DH and I are going to faculty meeting on Wednesday to share our concerns, which our main teacher requested as a way to drive home the need to clean up to the jr high teacher. Apparently, folks have been trying to deal with this since the fall. I understand this, but I'm still having trouble with the fact that the stuff has been out there for so long, I never saw it, and the folks who did thought it should be cleaned up, but didn't do more than say so. Tradgedy of the commons anyone? I'm glad it wasn't worse.