Laminating is fun...

Today I laminated. A lot. The lamination machine has been broken (or missing paper or missing a person to run it...) for the past two days so none of my posters had been laminated. I went into school today to finish setting up my room and finally the machine was up and running and there was no one around so...  I know it's against the rules to use the laminater or the copier, but come on! My kids need educational indoctrination! I need info. sheets and parent letters! I had to break the rules. When my principal walked in and saw me blatantly breaking copy machine/laminater policy (multi-tasking rule breaking at its finest) he complimented me on my hard work and determination. Go figure.

So my room in all its new paint splendor is as bright and inspirational as I can possibly make it. My air conditioner sometimes things about working, but really doesn't. This leaves me with either condensation on the walls and the floors pretty much all the time. Any paper I leave in the room I can guarantee will be moist for the rest of forever. It's too bad I'm not teaching science, we would be living in a real life petrie dish. Who knows when that will be fixed? Who knows when the math teacher who is supposed to be teaching next door to me will actually show up?

My schedule for Monday (though I cling to it loosely because it has already changed twice in one day) has me teaching three classes of 7th grade ELA. One of those is now pre-AP which is a surprise, but still cool. Now I have to do pre-AP training and Gifted and Talented training. This is all well and good, but it will take me out of my classroom a lot and I don't like that at all. Currently the schedule says I'm teaching a class with 27 students, one with 29 and, oh yeah, one with 33. I only have 30 desks in my classroom. I guess we'll do like we did this summer, sitting is a privilege in Ms. Thompson's class. I dread the thought of actually having 33 students in one class room, but my principal keeps saying "be flexible" we'll work it out. Before or after my nervous break down I wonder? I also have a team period that has 17 students in it. Two of them are 8th graders and one is a beginning English speaker. That should be interesting.

This is all so confusing. I have no idea what Monday will look like. I'm working really hard on not freaking out, but it's not really working. I have one weeks worth of semi-lesson plans and then we don't have anything else set because the other teacher on my grade level has been "too busy to plan." I like the TFA thought: "If you don't have a plan for them, they'll have a plan for you." We will not have a repeat of the first week of teaching this summer, that I'll make sure of.