A Wattersonian Ending to an Epic Week . . .

I will be brief because I have exceeded my screentime limits this week and my brain is fried, but things were fairly epic this week:

1) we got a massive amount of snow;

2) my school is slated to go back to the trainwreck that is hybrid school-- the snow delayed us until Monday-- but the day of reckoning is coming and the majority of teachers are not happy about it;

3) we had the craziest faculty meeting I've ever witnessed . . . teachers are very nervous about covid and feel very betrayed about the not particularly reassuring quarantining, sick day, paid and unpaid leave policies (but our union did get some concessions)

4) the message seems to be: if you get covid, you better prove you got covid at work, or you could be in for a rough ride (or maybe you should lie)

5) I'm less worried about covid and more worried that I'm not going to be able to do as good a job in hybrid-- I've been crushing remote, I've got everything figured out and my students are really doing quite well-- but hybrid is a lot of juggling and multi-tasking and glitchy internet and fogged glasses and muffled voices;

6) the new mask rules are Draconian (15-minute break per school day . . . fifteen minutes total . . . and you can't  take your mask off even if your classroom is empty-- this defies all logic and science but seems to be coming from the state level) and I hate teaching in a mask;

7) I reeled off a couple of crazy letters, one to the union and another to the superintendent . . . I can't believe I pressed send on that one: I assigned the superintendent a podcast and gave him a link to a covid room calculator . . . things are not as dangerous as people think (unless this new variant is an ass-kicker) but I don't think I'll get fired as no one wants to become a teacher right now;

8) I erased an entire semester of student work (some of which I had to grade) trying to switch my content from one semester to the next-- we really didn't get much training on this-- and it took three days for the people from Canvas to retrieve this data . . . which they finally did after many chats and emails (and now I still have to grade the stuff!)

9) I started the new semester, in which I teach four preps . . . and I thought I had everything in order so I went out drinking in New Brunswick last night-- the walk home was pretty crazy as no one shoveled the hill after the bridge-- it's no man's land . . . but I made it up and watched Rutgers win again;

10) I woke up this morning with a bit of a headache and found that nothing was in order-- I hadn't merged my Creative Writing and Philosophy classes and they were much larger than I thought and I hadn't invited all these kids into the proper Microsoft Teams . . . it was quite a circus but everyone eventually got where they needed to be;

11) I finished grading the Rutgers essays-- in the nick of time-- grades are due Tuesday;

12) I went out hiking in the snow with Lola after school today and it erased all the stress from the rest of the week because dogs and snow are the best (almost as epic as stuffed tigers and snow).