Well hello Friday. So nice of you to come. Appreciate it. Seriously, 13 days into the school year and I finally have my first documented positive COVID exposure at school. It’s OK. Masking is everywhere, I am in the room with kids, I do help kids, I walk the room and give personal attention, but I’m trying to be careful with time and handwashing and telling kids to pull their masks up etc. It’s all we can do. Probably there have been other positive cases in my classroom that I don’t know about. I do worry about the kids though. So far, no one has been really sick that we know of, but I suspect it’s a matter of time. It’s a tough balance…getting kids back in school so they’ll do stuff is important, but so are their lives.
Meanwhile, the state has decided to overburden teachers again with proof that we actually try to educate kids who are stuck at home on quarantine. This job gets little respect from many parents and politicians, mostly those who have never done this job, probably never stepped foot on campus. So we’ll see what that looks like. I’m teaching art and science, both hands-on curriculum, so I’m back to making a million videos a week to make up for what they can’t do in person. Luckily, what we’re doing next week already exists digitally! Yay! Thank last year’s selves for doing that. It won’t always be that easy.
I am exhausted. I feel overwhelmed by all the minutiae. I have too much to grade already, and it’s really just the basics. I am managing a little ironing every night though…my pre-meditation meditation. The slowing of the brain activity, the stress monkey part anyway.
Wednesday was fussy little hiking trail parts…
Plus that lizard…it’s really that color…
Then the next part, last night, I only had about 45 minutes because we were out, but I got a good chunk of trees ironed down.
It went much faster. It’s going to get fussy again with the man hiking through and with the face that’s hidden in the trees on the right, but that’s OK…because it will be the weekend by the time I get to those. I’d really like to finish ironing this together this weekend. I have a deadline I’m looking at and now it’s tight. It’s OK if this isn’t done by then, but it’s a goal. We’ll see. Time flies when your day job sucks up all the moments.
So we did go to the opening last night at The Studio Door. I only had an hour in me for that…I was tired.
I still really like this piece by Julia C. R. Gray. And mine behind it…they go together!
There were plenty of people coming in to see the work…lots of unmasked folks though.
You can see three of my pieces in this photo. The man took pictures of me with some of the work. I’ll post those later. For now, I need to leave early for school because we couldn’t plan science yesterday and there’s a new unit coming up and I know we can get it all together, but IDK if we can get it all together before I need to print a table of contents for the kids. Minor issue. We will all survive.
Three-day weekend ahead…artmaking, a hike (even though we can’t go up to the mountains like I wanted because they closed them 8/31 for fire danger), finish my damn book! And maybe get some sleep. We’ll see. Lots of grading and planning too…but hopefully just on one day.
Kathy Nida 