Who needs sleep???

I had a frightening encounter last week when I said to a few random students in the hall: "Yes we was". This was in response to them asking if the other teachers and I were having a meeting. I think this is a sign that I'm regressing. I hope I'm not catching any more bad habits.

Last week was kind of uneventful since we had to make up semester exams because of the snow days before the break. Last Friday was the first official day of the second semester. However, unfortunately for me, it was an A day following A day exams. My plan for the first two days of the 2nd semester was to focus on investment by looking at student data from last semester and reflecting on where we want to go and how to get there. The problem was getting the data all organized the night before right after the tests were given.

So long story short, I ended up spending from about 7pm-4am copying and pasting and reformatting from my excel tracker to a word document that had individual data summaries for all 130 of my students broken down by standard and unit. It was very frustrating at the time not being able to figure out a more efficient method of accomplishing this task and knowing at 1am that it was going to take me the rest of the night to finish.

I laid down at about 4am and kind of went back and forth between awake and crazy hyper dream state (which I'm not sure was better than awake) until 5:15am when I had to get ready for school. I made sure to get a cup of coffee on my way to school, but I think I was in a semi-drunken state for the rest of the day. But having classes and 20+ kids in your classroom has a way of keeping you alert and on it.

I have to say in the end it was worth it because I thought the lesson went pretty successfully. My students and I had a lot of issues to address involving their perception of my class and their behavior/performance, and also some things that I need to change and do differently to better meet them where they are. We had a very open discussion about ways they think I can improve (some constructive and reasonable, others not so much), and I think they seriously reflected on how they really didn't want the class to continue like it has. I think I got them  to see how they can change the classroom culture starting our next class period.

We'll see. I need to stay consistent and be persistent.But that was a pretty awful night before Friday. Well now I'm caught up on sleep and I need to get my lesson plans together. Here's hoping for another snow day this week *fingers crossed*!