No, no TKT today. Not after grading several dozen papers and essays and then cleaning out about a hundred student e-mails, half of which were to tell me they weren’t in class because they’d overslept or mis-set their alarm clocks though I instructed them at the beginning of the year to not bother with e-mails like that, but they’re students, so what can you say? Woo, that was a long sentence. I guess that’s how my mind is right now: long sequences of thoughts, reminders, ideas, and frustrations just trying to get out in a stream or torrent though I haven’t been letting it out. I should post more. This once a week stuff is crap, and I think I’d feel better for it if I ranted daily once more. I’ve got about forty minutes left to be here and little else I want to do to do, so I guess I can ramble now.

Great. Now I’ve suddenly forgotten what it was I was going to rant about. Oh well, I’ll just go on about my day and then meander from there. I slept a lot last night. I mean, a lot. I went to bed around 7:30 because I wasn’t feeling all that well, added to the fact that I’d gotten two hours of sleept the night prior thanks to massive amounts of grading to do. So I went to bed early only to be woken up a couple times by the phone. One was Simon asking some question that I can’t even remember, and the second was Ian calling during his lunch break as usual. When I woke up this morning, I was actually lying on my cel phone. Good thing it was closed. But at least I got some rest. Hopefully I don’t have to pull any other all-nighters (the French call it passer la nuit blanche “to spend a white night.”) before the end of the term. Luckily, there are only four classes left before the final then I’ll get another break, a longer one. Maybe I’ll finally get that study cleaned up. I hate how messy I can be. My office is actually fairly neat all of the time, but the house almost never is. I don’t understand why.

I cleaned out about a hundred e-mails today. I think that next semester I’m going to have to stress the importance of not e-mailing me every time they miss class because it just makes me not want to check my e-mail when I see twenty of those in there. And then of course I miss the few important ones until about a week later. Yup, I need to be sure next semester they understand they’re not to e-mail me about having missed a class after the fact. There’s just no reason. It eats up my time when I could be coming up with fun and exciting new lesson plans, anything to make the classes more interesting and informative.

I guess I haven’t been feeling all that creative with my French classes so far. I’m slowly coming up with ideas, but it’s frustrating that this being my first semester and all, I really don’t have the stockpiles of lesson plans and worksheets and the like to use in class to mix things up and make them more interesting. I’m working on it; I’m trying new things and I’m trying to come up with new things, but I still just feel like I’m failing. I guess what irritates me more is when someone points out all the dozens of things I could be doing better yet they don’t understand that this is my first time teaching a foreign language so of course I’m going to make mistakes and I’m going to have lots of room to improve! Get off my back! I’ll get there, but it’s not going to happen overnight. Quelle chiasse! They don’t realize how hard it is to move from teaching purely lecture-based classes to French ones, and they also don’t realize that I haven’t actually taken a French class myself in a couple years, so my French is on the rusty side. Damn them and their nitpicking. I generally wouldn’t care so much about what other people say about me, but this is my job and I’d rather not be told I’m doing it badly. Meh. It’s a process. Why can’t they see that? Critics.

Damn. Still thirty minutes until I leave. Of course, I’m just going to leave and head straight for the laundromat. I think this might be the last time, however, because the husband and I are planning on going to pick up a new washer either tomorrow or Saturday. I’m looking forward to it. Being the one who does laundry, I’d rather not keep this up, especially once it starts getting colder. And why is it always raining when I do laundry at the laundromat? Nine times out of ten, it’s raining either when I leave to do laundry, it starts raining when I’m there doing laundry, or it starts when I leave the laundromat. Stupid weather. Oh well, I’m going to see if I can’t come up with some fun way to do a review for the final. I’m thinking Jeopardy-style questions. We’ll see how that goes.