1 down, 39 to go...

Soooo, week 1 of the '09-10 school year has come and gone. It was an interesting one to say the least. I definitely enjoyed getting to know my kids finally. It was, however, incredibly exhausting going back to waking up so early in the morning and being "on" and performing at 7:25 am. There were a few nights I was in bed before 9:30. Rather than giving you the play-by-play, how about the highlights?

• HUGE classes, my smallest is 27 biggest is 31
• Really really really nice kids
• I only made it through 2 lessons this week (including the introductory syllabus discussion) because these kids participate and share way more than I was prepared for
• One girl made me laugh when she didn't have her syllabus on the 2nd day. She told me, "well in my defense, I threw it away." Really? That's your defense?
• We're trying homeroom (not the 10-minute variety that meets every day) this year which met every day last week adding an additional class to my schedule. Next week we don't have homeroom so I'm excited to see if the day passes faster.
• One of my favorite students from last year is my student aide!
• Today was a professional day in which I attended 2 meetings and skipped out on the third to go home and take a nap! LOVE it!

** And I'm gonna go ahead and make a big deal about this last one since it was probably THE highlight of my entire week......

• I loved so much that I could pull up a folder on my computer and a lesson was sitting there waiting to be printed!!!!!!!!! I didn't have a single thing to bring home with me this week :] :] :] :] :] :]

I know it's early in the year and things will get more hectic. I'll probably end up bringing some grading home. But nothing was as time-consuming as having to create those two lessons every single day last year. Even grading, which can take a long time, is so much more mindless than lesson planning and therefore so much less exhausting. It's also a little less pressing in that if you take an extra day on something the kids won't be sitting around with nothing to do.

In short, I'm a happy camper so far. I've hit a little snag with my internship, but I'm confident it will get resolved.

In other news, this was also our first week living with Jennie and it went great! Tonight we had Josh & Jennie's little cousin Taryn staying with us. Josh and I took her to the playground this afternoon and then we had pizza for dinner. Tomorrow we're planning to hit up the MD state fair and see all the animals and eat some deliciously bad-for-us food!

Happy Labor Day weekend!!!