OK well that was a lot. I think I graded for 9 hours yesterday and didn’t finish. Need to adjust something. Might be me. Not sure how though. OK, so what art did I do? I finished tracing pieces on Wonder Under…
Well, I traced Friday night and almost finished…and then traced Saturday night and finished…
It took almost 13 hours to do about 4 1/3 yards of Wonder Under.
Then last night, I started trimming it and didn’t even finish a yard.
Also, that’s just under an hour, because that’s all I’ve been able to pull off the last week or month or eon. And this week, I think I have to be at school early 3 days, so I really should go to bed early the nights before, but I never do. Sleep is so HARD y’all. I just am not very good at it. I finish meditating, I’m all chill and relaxed and ready for sleep and then my brain yells “HIGHLIGHTERS! THE KIDS WILL NEED HIGHLIGHTERS TOMORROW!” and I’m like, Brain, you could have told me that tomorrow morning and it would have been fine, but no, “HIGHLIGHTERS!”. Ugh. Anyway, I will be trimming most of the week. I did get my quilt photos for the last one back from the photographer yesterday, but was too busy grading and cooking dinner to look at them. I’ll do that tonight and pack up the quilt and ship it to the new owner, which is exciting in itself.
In other cool quilt news, Kathy Ford was nice enough to photograph my quilt Portrait of One Self at Quilts=Art=Quilts this weekend.
Apparently it is right up front at the entrance, which is cool.
I wish I could have been there, but I also greatly appreciate the photos. Sometimes my work goes to shows and I never see it in the exhibit and I wonder if it’s actually there. Of course it is, but it doesn’t seem real if I don’t see it. So there it is!
I also went to the ceramics studio on Friday and did a copper wash, mostly wiped off, on the base and the upper torso, and then a light clear satin over that, and then put it in the pile of stuff to be fired. I also put the head in for a bisque fire, and fixed the tree again. Hey, compared to all the fixes on the upper torso, this is nothing.
Remind me to work on something smaller next time. Way smaller. Yeah, I know, it’s not in my nature.
I also went to the dentist on Saturday, where they did this weird 3D scan of my teeth.
Creepy shit.
And then I graded for a million hours.
Fun times. We’re having to go back and reteach some stuff, like the difference between evidence and inference, and where explanation goes (not in your claim), so they can write about science without making it sound like a narrative of their lives (tough one that). One of the more frustrating parts about teaching 8th grade is the obsession with getting Principal’s Honor Roll so they can sit on the stage for promotion. Except they’re learning new skills and it’s really hard to get an A on a new skill in the first month of doing that skill. And they’re so obsessed with the A that they can’t focus on what they need to do to get there. Anyway. It’s a challenge for them (and me) to get them there. Hence 6 emails from one kid and then one from his mom, all on Saturday, until I sent one back about hey, school is about learning. If he already knew everything, he wouldn’t need to come here. And some more stuff. Parental pressure like that is also not helpful. But also, it’s only going to get harder from here on out and I’m not sure he has the A in him. We’ll see. But that’s the point, right? That they grow and progress? Not that they are an A straight off the bat. Sigh.
So I graded in the car as a lovely person drove me to Huntington Beach for a meeting that I also graded through (I contributed to the meeting, so don’t think I blew that off…it was a lot of discussion of how to meet and get members moving forward, which was necessary but not fun), and then graded on the way back. I think I finally quit in Oceanside on the way back…so from 9 AM (I left my house at 8:30) to probably 3:30, and then I picked up my quilt and went home and graded some more. So yeah, at least 9 hours just on Sunday. Another 3 or 4 on Saturday. And an hour or two on Friday. I’m not done with that assignment either, although I didn’t do that in the car/at the meeting mostly. I did all the other things that needed grading. So three homework assignments, all their warmups for the week, plus essays, probably about 100 of them. I have 18 left…that’s probably 2 hours. Seriously. Ugh. I took one picture at the person’s house of this really cool piece of art…
I meant to ask if it was the same person who made the piece I saw at Sebastopol over the summer. I’ll email her and ask.
Otherwise, my weekend was a bunch of memes when I would take a break from grading…
It’s weird. And this really bugs me.
And harassing people who are following the law to be here. Or were BORN here. That’s fun. I totally want my money going to that when you can’t fund special education any more. Or rural schools.
I would love a Schoolhouse Rock song for this…
Someone will do it.
Yeah. That.
And lastly, though I’m going to BREATHE in instead of BREATH in…I think this is how my week is gonna go.
It’s been like that since the beginning of the school year.
Today, my coteacher is out, so I’m not sure whether I can copy the things I need to copy. We couldn’t meet Friday because she had to sub our prep period, because teachers called out without any warning and we couldn’t get subs. I get emergencies, but also, leave sub plans. Have emergency sub plans. I do. I also need to grade those 18 essays, but get kids through a review of what the fuck a CER is, because they’ve forgotten all the things. Next year, we’ll do this earlier for goodness’ sake. We will NOT assume they were taught things last year. Even if we’re the ones that put all those things into the 7th-grade calendar. It’s fine. Really. I love reteaching when I have a shit ton of content to get through before the state test. Then staff meetings about a debrief of something we didn’t do because they never opened the list of sign ups for us to be observed doing it. So yeah, that’ll be a fun, “hey y’all dropped the ball yet again”, in fact I don’t even know if you know where the ball is. Then ceramics today? Or tomorrow? I can’t decide, so I’ll take my stuff with me…I think it needs to be tomorrow though. Yeah, it does. I forgot about book club. I don’t even know what book I was supposed to have read, so hopefully some other part of my brain took care of that and already read it. Yes, that’s where we’re at right now. It’s not great and it’s not particularly enjoyable, but at least I’ll be doing art stuff at the end of the day to make up for all that crazy nutso fuckedupedness.
Kathy Nida 