so long, and thanks for all the shrunken heads

Things have been quiet 'round these parts this past week, and this is largely due to the fact that I've been a flurry of end-of-the-school-year activity. Cleaning out my classroom, weeding through a mountain of emails, and grading final projects and papers has left very little time for play, hence I've been a very dull girl. HOWEVER, I am now officially a lady of leisure, and as I type this I am sitting on my deck drinking a large glass of sangria, working on my first sunburn of the season, and have just noticed that a fairly large wasps' nest has formed on the inside of the umbrella from under which I sit. So I imagine that something fairly interesting is bound to happen any minute now.

Wait for it...

Anyway and retrospectively, this year's been quite the mixed bag. In some ways it's been one of my most successful, easiest school years to date. I had a wonderful, unusually bright and friendly group of kids, I mentored a student teacher who was fairly capable, thus could help shoulder some of the enormous burden this job can be, after seven years of the same I FINALLY got to teach a new class, and that new class is both awesome and a joy to teach. So, yay.

However, for all its successes and joys, it's been a beastly year as well. I had three preps and last hour planning, which meant I was teaching like a frenzied maniac until the very last hour of the day, I had to share a classroom, which made it virtually IMPOSSIBLE to get anything done on my prep hour, I had some of the most demanding parents I've ever had, I decided THIS would be the year I'd write a novel in a month, and I handled all this while managing some personal stresses which, more than once, made me want to phone it in. However, it is now done, and I'm fairly comfortable saying that I was friendly, helpful and supportive more days than I was not. I just hope my students felt the same.

Regardless, a glass of fruity wine and a long stretch of lazy sunny days lay ahead of me, and I'm anxious to start enjoying both. (Barring, of course, a vicious wasp attack and/or my pasty, pasty skin lighting aflame, either of which are bound to happen any second now.) So to conclude, I leave you with two things my students left me.

This, which housed a multigenre research paper on Things Fall Apart, and which I plan to somehow sneak onto my Principal's desk next year:

And this, a line from one of my students' final exam essays:

"Lady Capulet was persistant and medling and says things to Juliet like 'what are you busy, ho?' Which just isn't nice. She was alot of things, but a ho? No."

Yep, we sure learned good this year. We learned real, real good.