back to school night

Today I woke up with a stinging pain in my eye. This pisses me off so much, because I've been doing exactly what the doctor said to do - using artificial tears, cleaning out the eyes with baby shampoo every night, cleaning the contacts well. It's just like I had a flare up, the first since last May or so. I skipped the morning gym trip and figured it had happened because I was tired, and that I'd be able to put in my contacts eventually. That never happened; the eye was sore all day, and now I'm having a hard time discerning whether it's because my eye is irritated, or if it's because I have a cold. And I cannot express how much I hate wearing glasses.

I'm working too hard right now, I know that. I've been at school each night this week until later than I'd like, in the 6pm and 7pm range, and today I just got home at 9pm. That's 13 hours straight at school. And, of course, my job does not end when I leave; I come home and plan for the next day.

Anyhow, today I taught, I showed A Lesson Before Dying after school (and cried during it, although I think it was more because I had tears running down my face all day anyway because of the eye pain and the sad movie just exacerbated it), and then had to move my car, then had Back to School Night.

Back to School Night isn't fun. We have to stay at school until 9pm, and I don't know any of my students yet (have seen each group just three times so far), so all I do is give my spiel about the class and then the parents are gone. Put me in front of a group of 30 fourteen-year olds, and I'm fine. But put me in front of ten adults, and I'm nervous. I feel like they're staring at me much moreso than I feel like young people are. I don't know why. It makes me nervous.

Plus, even though this year's Back to School Night seemed to be more organized than usual, it was still disorganized. I think anytime you make parents follow their kid's schedule - complete with complicated A day and B day courses, and quarter 1 and quarter 2 courses - with ten minute class periods, well, you're going to have some disorganization. So I just went through my spiel, and hopefully got just about every parent to sign up on my e-mail list so I can start that up next week sometime.

My advice to all the parents - read over kids' work, look at their planner, read the novels along with the kids if you can - sounded redundant as I went, but I was happily surprised to see some parents taking notes. Others just seemed to stare at me, expressionless. I guess it was a long day for them, too.

It was really great to see some of last year's kids' parents. I had a group of parents who were phenomenally active last year, and they were so nice and thankful all the time. Here they were, again, tonight, making a special trip to thank me and say hi. Good people.

I gave "Bobby" a ride home afterwards. The principal asked him to valay park for parents for the event, which meant for most just to direct them where to go. I asked him how he was chosen, and the pricipal apparently just came to his class and asked him. I'm glad that someone else has figured out how special this kid is. Only a few kids were chosen.

His computer broke and his phone is cut off at home. Of course, all I could think about was when I could afford to get him a Dell computer for $300 like I got myself last January for school. We'll see.

It's good to be home, but I'm so tired right now. Exhausted. My eye is still in pain, and I've got a lesson to plan for tomorrow. My printer at home does not work, so I have to e-mail the document to myself in the morning, for the chance that I can find a working printer in the school somewhere.

In positive news, my first pay day in ten weeks occurs in approximately 2.5 hours. It's for eight days instead of ten, and of course they're doing full deducations and will not reflect the new raise, but I'm still happy that my parched bank account will have its thirst quenched.