Snow Days and other such catastrophes

I must admit that I am addicted to snow days. I shouldn't be, I'll be teaching year round before too long, but the temptation of getting to stay home in my warm bed rather than going to school makes me giddy. I haven't taught a full week since before Christmas break! It is exhilarating to be lazy. I would like to lie and say I engage in marvelous tasks, but rather I must confess I sleep in - LATE, slink around my place watching mindless TV or blogging (today) and then I resurrect myself in the late afternoon and slink some more. I go to bed late to counteract my overdose of sleep endorphins and the ugly cycle repeats. I always have great ambition for snow days. I make lists of things to accomplish with my spare time and yet I consistently fall short. I have a problem with relaxing. The problem being that I can't do it. It's a skill I never learned. In essence, sleeping is the only relaxation technique I've got. I like to read, take photos, watch movies, go for walks, sit in the hot tub, but those things all come with a layer of self-imposed pressure. Sleeping is the only activity where I can even REMOTELY turn my brain off. Even though, my brain works all night and I remember most of it in the morning.  I do my best problem solving and writing while I'm either sleeping or in the shower. I have been known to wake-up in the middle of the night and go work on a paper or poetry b/c that is when the words flow the freest.

New invention in the kitchen! I'm basically living on peanut butter and marshmallow fluff or nutella and toast these days. So I got the bright idea to combine. Now I live on peanut butter, fluff and nutella sandwiches. And they are amazing. Thick and rich, have the glass of milk ready. For a girl who has a love/hate relationship with food, they hit all the right spots.

Education bitch for the week: The way our current system is structured, good teachers feel worthless and defeated. Like they are bashing their heads against a brick wall each day to no avail. I'm hesitant, at best, to include myself in the sub-population of good teachers, b/c I haven't been doing it very long and I might be in fact doing it all wrong anyway.  However, I do the best I can. I research and utilize best practices. I attempt to meet the individual needs of my students. I form bonds with each child. I teach, as opposed to worksheet. Seriously, I do the best I can. And I know my friends do, too. But when standardized tests come around, our students on average show little to no growth (some even lose content knowledge) and we are stuck wondering where we went wrong. Thus, perhaps snow days are an avoidance technique for me. I'm avoiding the impending failure of my teaching practices. Behaviorally my students have grown by leaps and bounds! But as a dear friend reminded me, behavior doesn't necessarily prepare them for the next grade level. Ahh, such is life.