ahora vamos a contar

Querido paperwork & last-minute testing,

Please go away. Do not come again another day. When I bury you underneath my students' homework and behavior sheets, be a doll and disappear. But be sure to erase my principal's memory right after you disappear. Thanks.

Atentamente,
La maestra

End of year paperwork and checklists are stupid. There are a bazillion things that I would have plenty of time to do if my 6- and 7-yr-old students could work totally independently all day long OR if i could use my entire planning and lunch times, plus 4.5 hours after school, every day for a week to inventory books and materials, type up then print out then copy by hand onto another sheet that is not available online test data, collect grades, do report cards, and do the language proficiency tests that the counselor brought up to me like so:

Mr. Counselor: "Do you know what serendipity is?"
La maestra: "Yeah, sure."
Mr. C: "A random act of good luck."
La maestra: "Yeah, like the movie."
Mr. C: "Well, I've got some anti-serendipity for you."

I'm an agreeable person and accepted very quickly this testing double-duty that has been thrust upon me with six days left of school. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to bitch about it on my blog. Luckily, my awesome 1st grade teammates busted some serious ass with me after school, and out of EIGHT PAGES of inventoried texts and materials that the previous teacher checked out in august, i was missing only ONE set of cassette tapes. we figure cassettes will be obsolete soon enough that they probably won't even charge our grade level account, knock on wood. so as i was handed a helluva lot of work, i got a helluva lot of work done in the same day.

the jump in the line dance is looking kinda messy at the moment, but we're hoping to fix the thrashing and raucous hip-shaking by giving kids signs and tambourines (by "fix" i mean "distract the viewer", and by "signs" i mean paper plates with letters that spell "jump in the line", "shake" and "work" in indiscernable glitter). we spent 80% of the morning language arts block listening or dancing to the song and making various paper/glitter products for the performance. our afternoon math block was spent with a very long group read-aloud of eric carle's la mariquita malhumorada followed by the making of construction paper ladybugs. to make it educational, they had to copy a blurb from the book about how ladybugs eat aphids and therefore make plants happy.

i know, i'm out of control with this badass teaching. today i hit up the library and got a dozen books about insectos, which they'll be able to share-read for about an hour before i pop in one of the four movies they'll be watching the rest of the week. feels like i've been doing this for YEARS.