final-ly getting there

After a ridiculously busy month of May, the end of the school year is in sight ...

This week is "Finals Week" at the virtual school!

Although it means exams for my nearly two-hundred students, it means lots of email, phone calls, and troubleshooting of various technical difficulties for me.

Oh, and let's not forget the grading of those two hundred plus tests!

And, while it's been a stressful week so far (and a flurry of nonstop activity), the light is just starting to appear at the end of the tunnel.

After Friday, (when all that test grading is complete) grades will be due and all of my students will be done, so my agenda will become a lot less jam-packed through the end of June.  Yes, I'll still be "working" until July 1st, and there will be multiple meetings to attend, files to go through, documents to back-up, and plenty of other school-related duties ...  But my time will begin to become my own again.

(At least a little bit of it.)

This means that, instead of being glued to my computer screen, I'll have more opportunities to take my kids to the park, the zoo, or out to a store ...  In the middle of the afternoon!

Or, if we choose to hang out at home, we can just bum around together and have lunch picnics on the porch, read stories, or play games.

With this increased amount of work geared around my students (and struggling to fit it all in during the work day), comes an increased amount of guilt that I'm not doing my own children any favors.

Malcolm is engrossed in the TV for far too long.

Pearl walks around aimlessly, gathering toys and signing "more" as she brings them to me ...  Her way of asking to play.

It will be so nice when I can finally shove my computer in the background (or just shut it down completely) and actively accommodate my kids instead of my students.

Being a classroom teacher (virtually or otherwise) is hard.

Being a mom is hard.

Being both at the very same time is borderline impossible.

So, it is with a huge sigh of relief that I look forward to the end of this week ...  When finals are over and the school year is done.

I'm probably more excited than my students!