It’s late Sunday afternoon. In the past, I’d have been working on my presentations, trying to make the week’s material informative, fun and engrossing for my students. But I’ve been told to keep the extra touches out of my PowerPoints, no pictures of my pup allowed. I’ve been told I have to be teaching exactly what everyone else in teaching when they are teaching it. I will have to give my students the same test as everyone else, despite their bilingual status. I could argue harder for adaptations, I suppose, or simply adapt and wait for the reprimand, but I don’t think much of the math is adaptable anyway. Science classes are a bit luckier. We are still making modifications for special education and bilingual in science, largely because no one has noticed and we have not yet been forbidden to do so. Still, there’s not much to be done. I have to go online and into my mail to find out what I am supposed to do. I’ll do that shortly. In the meantime, MAP testing and ACCESS testing are coming at me like a freight train and testing will be blowing up the bridges that are my classes regularly for the next two weeks. Blamm!! No science today!! I’ll need to create a calendar to plan for these frequent interruptions.

Eduhonesty: The creativity I once associated with teaching has mostly vanished. That creativity was undoubtedly my strongest point, the reason why my classes generally flowed well with minimal interruptions. I miss the old days.

I utterly lack the motivation to attack tomorrow’s material, whatever it is, but I have to check the mail and googledocs. My students need me. I haven’t left a student behind yet. I am going to do my best to give the kids what they need. That said, I hope I can be forgiven for feeling like my helicopter is spiraling down in a plume of oil smoke right into the heart of Mogadishu.