I actually cannot say anything bad about today!

I did a shockingly teeny amount of work this weekend, and yet today went really well.

Friday night I stayed up till 3 am drinking wine and playing chess with Bobby, and then walked home tipsy in the ridiculously pouring rain, got in bed, and graded papers! I was actually really excited to read my 10th graders' homework responses from that day!

Saturday I helped Luke move and then went to Berkeley for Faith's birthday, where I ate vegan truffles and got the BEST 5 minute massage, which has been keeping me going ever since!

Sunday was my big day to do work. I started grading the stories the students wrote for their real writing first assignment, and I realized again how hard it is to grade, especially creative writing. I developed a rubric from the form I gave the students about what I was looking for, as on the form I didn't give a point value to each thing (like, is having the story be told in the first person worth the same amount as having sensory details?). That was hard, but I feel like I came up with a decent way to score them. Trouble is it took me about an hour to grade 5, and I have 47 of them! (I'll get quicker, I suppose.) Then I went to an activist-related talk for a couple of hours and had Bobby back over for dinner and chess. I entered my grades and then passed out.

Anyway, I did just a small amount of prep this weekend because I felt fairly lazy--ahem, I mean confident about things at the beginning of the week, although I will need to spend some more time prepping for Black Boy tomorrow or the next day. (I'm too tired tonight.)

Finally, for what you've all been waiting for, my meeting with the "mean" master teacher today went really well. I had given her a full week of lesson plans for this week, which she gave me really helpful feedback on. She also asked me to reflect on what's going well and not going well in the class. She told me that if she has a fully worked out lesson plan for the week ahead then she doesn't feel like she needs to sit in on the class, and that she'd jsut do that once a week or so, and that I could choose when I'd want her to do this, which is great. She wasn't in the class today, and I feel like that freed me up a little and I was definitely more at ease.

The only things I feel like didn't go perfectly today were that we didn't finish all the things I was hoping to in both classes. In the 10th grade class, there was a fire drill, which was really annoying because it delayed for another day finishing talking about something they worked on in groups on Friday. One thing I learned from the fire drill, though, is to make sure to give students the homework at the beginning of class so they can write it down (whereas the fire drill was 5 minutes before the end of class, so some students didn't come back for the HW). Also, in my other class, we didn't finish reading the myth we're going over in class, but we'll do that tomorrow. We did other good things today, like checking in about their creation myth projects.

I am really frustrated that instead of going to sleep right now (~9:30), I have a paper that was due this past Wed that I didn't do that my professor told me to have for her by this weekend, which I did not do, and I want to get that off of my to-do list even though I'm so tired I really don't care about it. I actually fell asleep with my head on the desk during our 15 minute break from class at SFSU. (I was dreaming, though I've already forgotten about what.) My classmate needed to wake me up once class was about to resume. Ugh. I guess my class is something I could say something bad about, but I'll refrain.