I love October baseball.  LOVE IT.  With so many games in the regular season, it is nice to finally watch games as though they all matter.  Because they do.  The only downside is that the overlap with football puts me in front of a television far more than I do the rest of the year combined.  

I’ve been getting to work long before dawn.  Yesterday, having arrived in the dark of night two hours or more before the kids would come in, I was surprised at their shouts and giggles about seeing a double rainbow.  In my little corner classroom, my nose to the grindstone, I hadn’t even realized it had rained.  And I had missed the rainbow.  A double.

My car had to get worked on today.  Brakes.  Ugh. I had to get a loner car to take to work and I couldn’t figure out how to unlock the doors, or how to set cruise control in the dark.  The worst part is always the bill.  Their is no such thing as a car repair bill under $250.  I dropped the loaner off and some kid was pulling in with my car, having taken it for a test drive to check out the new brakes, I guess.

Beyond the thousands and thousands of dollars that I am spending for a grad degree I do not want but have to get to keep my teaching certificate, my frustration grows with every assignment I complete.   As I learn more and more about how to manage people, lead meetings, involve my staff, develop collaborative spirits and foster effective communication, teaching and learning, my professors demonstrate less and less of these traits.  

The first few weeks months of school are a bit stressful for me.  Having The Mister around has been a true Godsend.  He has figured out dinner every night;  he has taken over paying the bills and he has done everything conceivable to ease my load.  While it has been truly wonderful to stay in the same classroom and teach the same grade this year, new curriculum in several content areas and adding graduate school classwork on top of my regular classroom responsibilities, I’m pretty useless at home.  In a nutshell, my brain is complete mush. 

Flash and I headed out the other morning with full intentions to drop him at his bus stop (now located nearly a mile from home) and for me to get to school even earlier than usual.  I headed out to the car a few moments before he did, hit the button to raise the garage door and was greeted with a screech and a clang.  The door had opened about six inches and stopped in a rather caty-whampus manner.  I hit the button again, allowing it to go back down, and then hit it again to go up, while providing meager assistance in the lifting, thinking it was just chillier than normal and the door was being stubborn.  No such luck.  I set my keys, phone and iPad on top of the car and tried again with more effort on my part.  No dice.

By this time, Flash had emerged and immediately realized the predicament.  The stubborn garage door was not unusual for us; The Mister had temporarily fixed it several months ago, addressing this same issue.  But now, just three hours after The Mister had successfully opened this same door and extracted his Jeep, we were stuck inside with a door that no longer seemed to be in the mood to cooperate.

Flash and I both tried several options.  We tried the red handle to disconnect the opener and allow us manual operation of the door, but to no avail.  So, we banged on this part, we shoved that part, we hoisted and pulled and pushed and negotiated, but it was clear, the door was not going up.  While I texted The Mister, looking for suggestions, Flash, with some difficulty, disconnected the opener from the door, hopefully allowing us to get the door up. 

Knowing our window of opportunity to get the car out might be extremely limited, I reminded Flash before we even began lifting the door, that if we got it up, he needed to KEEP IT UP until I got the car out.  With greasy hands, high blood pressure, worries about being late to school and a staff meeting, we both hoisted the door with all our might and it went up.  Flash vigilantly held the door while I ran to the car and backed it into the drive way.  Within minutes we were on our way to school. 

Heading straight to his school now, as the bus had long since gone, we were just turning the corner from our house when I heard something off the back of the car.  Realizing something must have fallen off the vehicle, I stopped the car and Flash jumped out with his flashlight app and looked in the road behind us.  Still black as night outside, he came back finding nothing.  We sat for a moment on the deserted road, conducting a quick inventory of our belongings.  Cell phone? Check.  Obviously we have the keys.  He clearly had his phone.  No clue what it was.  Maybe we had set the hammer or one of the pieces from the door on the car?  No clue, but we weren’t too concerned any more.  I had just put the car back into drive when my mush-filled brain realized the catastrophe at hand.  THE IPAD!!  The school-issued iPad to be precise.  Flash leapt out of the car and ran back looking frantically all over.  With a car now approaching behind us, I put on my flashers, put the car in reverse and began slowly following Flash hoping to provide additional light to the problem at hand.  Within mere seconds he bent over and picked up the aerodynamically-challenged iPad and ran back to the car.

“Please, please, PLEASE tell me it’s not crushed!” I yelled.  The case, a wimpy, cheap, not-impressive-at-all case, seemed completely intact.  Flash opened up the cover while I held my breath awaiting cracked glass and professional humiliation as the “techie” teacher is the first to destroy her school iPad.  There wasn’t a thing wrong with it.  Flash and I both exhaled a great proverbial-but-true sigh of relief and proceeded down the road to school.

Upon closer examination later, under sunlight and fluorescent lighting, there are a couple scratches on the corners of the cover that might allude to an altercation, but the iPad itself is in perfect working order.

My heart, however, is now about as useless as my brain after that near catastrophe.

My classroom is one of the smaller classrooms in our building.
My classroom has 27 second grade students this year.
My classroom has 15 boys and 12 girls.
My classroom has one diabetic child.
My classroom has one child on crutches after breaking both legs this summer.
My classroom has four students who spend portions of the day in the resource room.
My classroom has three students who receive speech therapy, and three more who need it.
My classroom has one student who receives weekly occupational therapy, three more who are “monitored” and two more who need it.
My classroom has two students who have behavior charts for every activity.
My classroom 11 students who are not academically at grade level.
My classroom has two students who spend time with the district social worker.
My classroom has more than one student who has seen a parent get arrested.
My classroom has more than one student who does not live with a biological parent.
My classroom has 5 computers and 24 reading books.
My classroom has push-in parapro support for one hour each day.
My classroom has a teacher who is fulfilling certification requirements by taking graduate courses that cost more than half her annual salary.
My classroom does not have one hour of uninterrupted time in the school day.
My classroom has a teacher who leaves the house at 6:30am and returns at 5pm.
My classroom is expected to implement new math stations this year.
My classroom is expected to implement new reading comprehension techniques this year.
My classroom is expected to implement new writing curriculum this year.
My classroom is expected to implement new reading stations this year.
My classroom has a teacher who has already spent more than she can claim on her taxes on her classroom.
My classroom has a teacher who will be evaluated based on student growth.

My classroom has a teacher who spent significant time this summer thinking through her schedule, her daily goals, her approach to curriculum, only to realize a week into school how futile a dream it is to think the teacher has any say or control over the logical order, timing or scheduling of academic subjects. 

My classroom has a teacher who wonders how on earth teachers in less fortunate districts ever teach anything at all.