Check out my new rack!

ha! :) I now have a medium sized drying rack for the kids that can't reach to the top of the tallest one! Also, last year I noticed that some of my classes were filing up the large and small drying racks and I wasn't able to always unload them because things were still drying...so now we have extra space! And Christmas in July, new Art supplies, LOVE THEM!



To answer lowercase monkey's comment/question about returning back to school and having no summer...it's a bummer--but it's true. Most of Georgia has switched over to shorter summers and having longer breaks throughout the year. That's the only reason I don't complain about not having a very long summer, because though the breaks sometimes come at inconvenient times during the year, sometimes you need a little break in the middle to give you back some sanity BEFORE summer break. It would just be nice to not have SO many breaks in the year so that summer could be a little longer and I think that's what some people have started pushing for.

What we've noticed is that you lose a lot of instructional time because of those breaks---because the kids (and us too) get hyped up and crazy right before the break and you have to get them back into following directions and procedures AFTER EVERY break! You won't even believe all the time we get off...we (teachers) start back the last week of July for post-planning--that's without kids. Then the kids come back August 4th. We get one day in Sept. for Labor Day, a week in October (called Fall Break), a week in November for Thanksgiving, a week and four days for Christmas Break and New Years, a day in January for MLK day, a week in February (called Winter Break), a week in April for Spring Break and the kids' last day of school is May 39th and ours is June 2nd. There's also early release days in there where the kids leave early and we stay for parent/teacher conferences.

I think kids attend 179 days or is it 180 days Lennye, Sarah? We work 190 days, I believe. I don't count them! Not half bad considering 365 days in a year. As teachers we don't make a lot of money...but we certainly get more time off than the average person, granted a lot of that time is spent working on school stuff---but not all of it---or shouldn't be all of it anyway!!

This summer we've been going in before pre-planning because our new school building opened up and we've had to unpack. Normally you wouldn't see us back up there until the last week in July. But, I'm not complaining because our old school was SOOO old and trashed. It has been around since schools were segregated!