Shortened summer vacation

Above: Last summer, Paul and I visited Shawn (in photo) in Arizona. This summer has
been shorter and faster--no time for Arizona this year.

Tuesday: My new job begins a week from Thursday, with the two-day New Teacher Orientation. The summer break feels very short! I know, I shouldn't complain. Many people we know (i.e., Liberto, Diana, etc.) don't get summer vacations at all. Actually, Liberto is up to 20 vacation days per year now. He usually uses 10 days for his annual Christmas trip to Venezuela, and then uses the rest of the time off for our little getaways to D.C., Phoenix, or Atlanta. This year, he is going to Venezuela in October for his 30th high school reunion, so he'll forego the December trip.

The brightest spot in my day was my long telephone chat with my dear friend Sharon. I wish we were neighbors, like Lucy and Ethel, so we could have our separate spaces and lives, but hang out for morning coffee and conversation (after the hubbies have left for work or golf).

In the morning, before I talked to Sharon, I did the usual errands, such as picking up the cat's thyroid medicine at the vet's, doing the daily food re-shopping at Food Lion to supplement the large weekly shopping, stopping at the post office to mail a trophy to a student who should have received it at school two months ago, but it ended up at home with me. Well, someone has to do these things! I can see how housewives of an earlier era sometimes felt undervalued. Those crashingly boring errands must be done every day, but often, the results aren't obvious. How many husbands check the cat's thyroid medicine bottle at the end of the day to see if it's been refilled?

I also found out this morning that Chatham County has officially approved my resignation, which is excellent. For awhile, my ongoing anxieties included scenarios where I either had unbreakable contracts with both Chatham and Bryan, or, even better on the anxiety scale, no contract with either Chatham or Bryan. In my adrenaline-pumping imagination, I imagined the worst what-ifs: Chatham approves my resignation, but meanwhile, Bryan doesn't receive my contract and drops the offer. Or, what if I had just imagined the contract with Bryan---doesn't that sort of thing happen to people with over-zealous fantasy lives? But it must be real because I've talked to the HR person at Bryan County, who seems to believe the offer was real because she said they're bringing me in as a step 22, which is the step I should have had in Chatham if they hadn't taken away this past year from my steps due to my alleged incompetence. Plus Bryan County pays more. Sweet vindication. As for my fantasies that the signed contract got lost in the mail, I did what every nervous nellie would do, and sent it by certified with return receipt. It arrived.

I'm very psyched up to be going into a school system with a reputation of academically-oriented students and highly involved parents. Groves' reputation was at the opposite extreme: daily news stories about low test scores and fights. Let's see if RHHS's reputation turns out to be true. I also have to admit that a teeny part of me feels stung that the administration at Groves was so blase about derailing my career, so casual about labeling me as deficient. I've also been doing some research on how school systems in other states evaluate their teachers, and I'm tempted to write it up as a report and mail it to the supt. In other systems, they not only rate teachers on a wide range of relevant teaching factors, (not just the 20-minute dog and pony show), but they also rate them on a scale of 1 to 4, with specific definitions of what each rating means. Those of us who have formally studied writing theory know that a rubric for anything, whether a class essay or a teacher evaluation, should have a range. Chatham County uses an "either/or" scale, which becomes highly subjective and arbitrary. If a teacher is either good or bad with nothing in between in categories that are only vaguely defined ("teacher supports students"), an evaluator can have a field day finding fault. The bigger question is, why are they so eager to find fault rather than support their teachers?
However, I'm not going to waste another second feeling analyzing any feelings of rejection. The end result is far more important!

It's now Wednesday, which shows how many times I was interrupted yesterday. Paul and I watched some recorded Cold Case episodes when he returned from class. Liberto got home exhausted---he's the acting director of the department this week, while the director is on vacation. Now I've got to get on with my plans for today.