Don't Hate Me Because I'm A Woman Of Leisure

This was not a good day for Mrs. Hillbilly Mom.

6:50 a.m...the #1 son forgot his glasses and had to take my keys and go back into the Mansion, thus delaying our departure time.

7:55 a.m...a student I don't even have came into my room to chat, which is just NOT DONE. I explained that I really had work to get ready by the 8:12 bell, but she laughed like I was kidding, and stayed. Never mind that I was in the middle of writing on the board, and looking for questions to review for the big End Of Course exam coming up next week. She wanted to chat about how everybody is taking my Biology course next year. The course in which I had all the tech kids and some more for a total of 28 students this year. That 28 would be 50 percent of next year's junior class, as they are small in number. It ain't happenin'.

10:25 a.m...a student whacked on my one remaining calculator, which I had deliberately not loaned to HIM, as he is the bad-lying denier artist who drew swastikas on two of my other calculators. I told him to stop, as did all the kids around him, and he said, "It doesn't matter anyway. It's stuck on that one number. All I did was push a button, and it locked up." Indeed. I suspect he hit some function button in error, then tried to reset it with the mechanical pencil I loaned him, which probably broke off a piece of lead in the reset hole, thus the whacking. I'm not as dumb as they want me to be.

10:57 a.m...I was squeezed out at the lunch table by Mr. G. It's not his fault that he had duty and needed to sit where he could see the whole panorama of misbehavior. I blame Mr. S, who takes up a lot of space with his long limbs, and stuck his elbow in my face for 20 minutes like he was rebounding his turkey sandwich on a deli roll.

11:22 a.m...a pitiful kid who is told weekly by other students to 'get a life and stop messing in everyone else's business' took it upon himself to fetch my doorstop and prop open the classroom door. That is like taking something off my desk. STOP IT! The kids don't prop it right. It slowly closes and impedes traffic.

11:50 a.m...a girl asked for a band-aid and wouldn't say why until I told her I needed to see the wound or send her to the office. She came up squeezing her finger, and I told her that she needed to pick the scab off that tiny week-old scratch before any blood would come out. She grabbed a band-aid and tossed it to another girl, who never showed me her wound at all. That's a conspiracy, by cracky! Last year, a sub gave out about 15 of my band-aids. You'd think there was a bloody rampage that day.

1:25 p.m...the custodian commandeered 10 valuable minutes of my plan time, as usual, making me make small talk. If I'm sitting at the computer, with the gradebook program open, punching in grades...I don't have time to chat!

1:50 p.m...got an email from a parent who's a teacher who asked me to loan her son a book. He lost his three or four weeks ago, and it was like the brotherhood of the traveling science book to hear him and mom tell the tale of which student's car it was in, and how it got left in the van when he got out, and how she put it in the back of her husband's truck, and how the last time he had it was on the baseball bus last week, but somebody took it. She will pay if she has to, but can I loan him one? NO. My policy is to never loan a book. Fool me once, you know. If someone borrows five dollars from you and never pays it back, do you keep loaning him five dollars? I think not. I've found that the only sure way of keeping enough books to go around is by never 'loaning' them. Why should I have to find the right edition and order more books every year because kids are not responsible? So...pay the $60 for the lost text, and I will check out another one to you. Because if a kid can't keep track of a book that's checked out to him, why will he keep track of a 'loaner' that is not? Oh, and I doubt that a baseball player took his book. They don't even bring their OWN books to class. I can't imagine picking up an extra one.

3:20 p.m...I got the End Of Course papers ready, which involved cutting and pasting and sending the #1 son to make my copies. He did OK on the first 17 questions, but on the second set, he lost two whole pages and had to do them over after wasting 90 pieces of paper and 30 staples.

4:40 p.m...left school after grading make-up tests and recording scores and getting tomorrow's stuff ready because, HEY, it's Wednesday, which means I have duty before and after school, plus there's an insurance meeting, and no doubt part of my plan time will be taken up by jawing about the weather.

5:10 p.m...had to run in Save-A-Lot because The Pony neglected to tell me he was out of the Breakfast of Champions aka Little Debbie Cosmic Brownies when I did the weekend shopping.

5:45 p.m...arrived home to do a load of laundry and make four different meals for supper. The #1 son did not want anything I had to offer, so made himself some Kraft macaroni & cheese in a pan that I do not use for such, and insisted on putting in SIX cups of water like the box says, even though I just put in half a pan of water in whatever pan I use and it works fine, and thus he had boiling noodle water overspilling into the burner drip pan thingy until HH yelled at him, and #1 said, "Thanks, Mom, for making my supper," which was a bit arrogant of him, as he was eating the salad that I had made him when his noodles overflowed.

6: 50 p.m...sat down to eat my supper and broke off a plastic fork tine while stirring some excellent green beans from my mom's Easter dinner, stirring to distribute the humongous pepper dune that appeared when I sprinkled pepper from the big McCormick plastic container with the red lid because the pepper shaker was conveniently empty, thus necessitating a careful combing of the green beans until the tine was found.

I'm ready to call it a day.