I feel like a zombie come back to life

As a sidenote: I'm sitting in a coffeeshop as a cute, male college senior talks with someone about his application to Teach for America. To the powers who make these decisions, please take more male teachers in this program. I can't even tell you how many of my students would benefit from more positive male role models in their lives. The Nashville corps is small enough that the ratio, not so different from the national one, feels very X chromosome heavy

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I took a sick day on Friday. Initially, I had thought it would be a mental health day but as the week progressed, it turned into an actual health day. I know my principal assumed it was a mental health day, but I actually went to the MNPS clinic and had doctor's orders to sleep, hydrate, and eat whatever I wanted. While stress does affect my body, I know how to read the signs pretty well and since a scare sophomore year, I've gotten really good at acknowledging when my body needs a break. Having a day solely devoted to doing nothing was exactly what my body needed. My headache disappeared (maybe with the help of lots of advil), nothing was blurry all day, and didn't feel the urge to heave more than once or twice.

But I felt so guilty being away from my kids. I missed them all. Even the one who talks when she thinks I'm not looking and then denies it. Even the one who has had a hissy fit almost every day for the last 4 weeks and no one can figure out why. Even the one who comments on my clothes and makes me rethink my outfit almost every day. All of them.  I hope that they would show the substitute that they were a well-behaved class, that they are smart and can talk candidly about what we're learning to catch her up to speed. While I'll get the full report tomorrow, my notes from coworkers indicated that it was not so good. Maybe they'll appreciate me more when I get back? Maybe?

The Teacher becomes the Teacher...to another Teacher?

I went in to school today to make some copies and bumped into the new 4th grade teacher. My school has added at least one new teacher onto every grade level, as well as some special ed teachers. They start sometime this week which I think most of the teachers are eagerly anticipating.

I unfortunately didn't have a lot of plans to share with her since I spent this weekend mostly in bed. I showed her around my classroom and shared with her some of what my class had been working on. The grade is supposed to do everything at the same time, but we've gotten off track in several different places. As we went over things, I asked her what she had in mind for her classroom management plan -- turns out this is her first year teaching and she hadn't quite thought through that yet.

I found myself giving her tips and advice. Me, after a few weeks of teaching that I can't even say were particularly successful at this point, I was giving suggestions.

Tonight, I have almost no idea tomorrow is going to look like with my kids. I spent the weekend getting myself better, not really lesson planning and definitely not getting started on my Unit 2 plans. However, after having spent a week and the weekend feeling absolutely horrible, I feel so energized to go back into school tomorrow. Disease, achievement gap, be prepared to have your behind kicked.

Finding Balance -- Part 1 of 4

I broke down and bought three things this weekend: A thermometer, a bathroom scale, and some powerful meds. I could feel myself getting worse and worse this week so I decided to be an adult and in true TFA fashion, went to get myself some data. Here it is -- this weekend my temperature reached up to 102 and I've lost 12 pounds since graduation. I've probably only worked out as many times as those digits combined so that's not a great sign.

So here's the plan. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to search for balance in spiritual, mental, physical and social.

The plan was to tackle those all in this one weekend, but seeing as the most imminent one is the physical, I'm going to slow it down a bit. I did get the chance to go out to happy hour with some of my colleagues on Friday night and it was really, really nice to remember that I have a life outside of the classroom. Although I did end up talking with some other teachers that were there and I just felt so reenergized with new ideas.

I spent yesterday literally doing nothing related to school. I went to Target, and spent the rest of the day in a horizontal position either on the couch or in bed. It was glorious. This three day weekend could not have happened at a better time.

You are drinking a liquid candy bar

I've been going to lunch with my kids all week because their behavior was so bad that I felt I needed to be an extra pair of eyes and ears in the lunchroom. While I was a huge fan of Jamie Oliver's miniseries on cafeteria lunches in the US, I hadn't had much experience with public school lunches since, well, I was in the 4th grade.

While the food itself isn't always what I would select as the most appealing, what makes me sad is the small percentage of my class that chooses flavored milk. I have 25 students right now, so it makes the percentage pretty easy to calculate. On my first day in the lunchroom, 1/25 students chose regular milk or as the kids call it "white milk" -- a name which makes it seem like we are so far removed from the actual product of milk, that stuff that comes from a cow, that out children don't even recognize the original.

I told some of them sitting near me that their flavored milk had as much sugar as a liquid candy bar -- at 160 calories, that might only be a small candy bar, but it's just about the same. I know that getting kids to drink any milk at all is a big success, but when the option is available to have "white milk" I do believe that we should encourage children to drink that. The next day, 3/25 students were drinking regular milk. Small successes.

I'm not alone in this debate over school milk. The NY Times just wrote a piece about the debate. I do wonder about the study that says that without the option of flavored milk, students will drink less milk overall.

Why the sudden interest in what my kids eat? Because I'm not being very healthy myself -- I have a pretty particular diet and I have been doing incredibly poorly at following through on it. That, and being surrounded by children with some kind of stomach virus/flu, means that I'm getting sick. We had one 4th grade teacher with a substitute last week and I saw what happened when you don't prepare for a sub -- either with lesson plans or have procedures down. The children acted as though they had not heard of any of the school rules. We have testing this next week that can't be administered by a substitute, so forgive me for not calling you if promised -- I've been trying to save my voice.

Now, to figure out what to do with 24 children while we conduct reading tests all day Monday....