Let's just say my two week in school feels more like 2 months. I'm one tired teacher.

Here's a recap of this week. The good news first: I made it!! (No, there isn't any bad news, except I was at school for 13 hours yesterday, which stunk!)

Luckily we didn't have school Monday, which made the week short and zoom by. Ben and I went to Idaho to a family reunion and then to visit friends in Boise. To make a long story short about our drive home, we got held up in traffic for about 2 hours because of a road closure due to a fire. Consequentially, we didn't get home until nearly 11pm, which since school started, is about three hours past my bedtime. Needless to say, I was not quite ready to wake up at that 5:30 alarm.

Tuesday I made sure that I warned my students that Mrs. Hubert is kind of tired and that if they didn't want an awnry teacher, I needed them to be on their best behavior. For the most part all 8 of my classes were great. I even had a few sweet souls tell me, "Mrs. Hubert, it looks like you need a nap." How thoughtful.

We've been learning about external text features all week (thank heavens it is a tiny, one week unit), which are features found in texts such as bold and italics words, pictures and captions, headings and subheadings, annotations, sidebars, etc. I thought this would be a fairly simple concept, but you would have thought I was teaching them advance calculus. I'm not supposed to say this to my students, but it is a boring and dull subject for me to teach and it only makes it worse when they are doing anything possible to stay awake. I mean, how do you make headings and subheadings exciting??

The one thing that confused them the most is turning headings and subheadings into questions to use as a study guide. All you have to do, I have told them a hundred times, is identify your heading and subheading and then include one of the following "who, what, when, where, why, how" to the beginning. For example, say your heading is "Different Forms of Energy." We turn that into a question by putting "What" at the beginning and get "What are the different forms of energy?" It completely boggled their minds. I even had one slight girl raise her hand and ask, "What's a question?" Yes. She was serious.

Tomorrow is their quiz on external text features. I think I prepped them pretty well today, but I guess we'll see. I am more excited for next week, however, when we will be starting our unit on autobiographies and biographies. I think I can make that unit a little more exciting than text features.

On another note, apparently I'm in charge of school picture day, which just happens to be one week away. Yeah, they never told me that so when this lady came up to me yesterday and said that I need to make a schedule for picture day, my jaw dropped. I have to organize picture day according to English classes and make sure every kid gets their picture taken. Oh, and I'm also supposed to provide the photographers with adequate drinks and refreshments for the time they are here. Wow. Not to mention, we are just starting to put together our first issue of the school newspaper, I have to get my yearbook staff on board to begin working on pages, and I need to prepare my little 8th graders to take the IOWA test.

I don't think I have enough to do quite yet.