Thursday, September 9, 2010

It's Good to Laugh

This year has started out so much more stress-free than last year. My 7th grade math colleague agrees. Last year was just so much push, push, push with the brand new text books and needing to write new lessons for everything and new assessments along with everything else new for the new books. Ick.

This group of kids continues to be fun.

The past two days of lunch have been filled with crazy stories and so much laughter. It's nice. We had a fun discussion about California's Proposition 19 (legalizing marijuana-related activities, among other things about marijuana) during lunch today. Yesterday the conversation was about concerts, old cars, and quoting movies. Well, the quoting movies part seems like it is turning into an everyday occurrence at lunch now. As long as our new health teacher keeps coming to lunch in the staff lounge, I have a feeling we will continue hearing movie quotes as we eat.

I was just about to shut down my computers today after the kids left when I decided to read one last e-mail. It was from our secretary who works in the copier room, making copies for teachers. I had put in an entire chapter of guided notes to be copied this afternoon for my Trans Math kids. It was the whole first chapter. That felt incredibly nice to be that prepared! The e-mail from our secretary was about making all of the copies that I requested this afternoon. This is what her e-mail stated:

"Hi Meg,

I did an oops. I was copying your projects and was wondering what was taking so long when I realized that your first project got entered as 1005 instead of 105 copies, so you have about 400 of one of your packets. :)"

Whoops is right! I figured that I now have copies of that lesson for a few years worth of teaching now at least. :) As I replied and let her know that, I found that I was laughing pretty hard about the whole silly situation, mistake and 400 copies and all. Again, it felt good to laugh and really mean it at school.

That's when I realized how really and truly stressed I was last year with the new curriculum. I can only remember a handful of times from last year when I laughed as hard or as often as I have this week. And it's only the first week of school.

Let's hope that this is the beginning of a theme of laughter and fun this year. I need that kind of year at school.

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