Longest school year on record

 is finally coming to an end. And I for one cannot wait. Last time I wrote was in January and we had just gone back to school in person and for real. What I did not know at the time was that we would remain in school for the entire semester come hell or high water. Let me recap. 

In January we had so many teachers staying home that we ran out of substitutes. We don't have that many substitutes, but in January getting one was unbelievably hard. We had students in and out of school because they had been exposed to Covid or had tested positive. It was literally a freaking nightmare. Then, on January 16th, the hubby tested positive for Covid and he also had pneumonia. I stayed home with him for a week, but then had to return to school. I was there for one day and had to take the next day off because he deteriorated and had to go to the ER on Tuesday morning. He was admitted into the hospital and ended up in ICU for 6 days. When he did come home he was considerably better but he was on oxygen and had absolutely no energy or stamina. He ended up being out a total of 8 weeks and returned to school after spring break in March. That was the scariest time of my life and I was mad as hell at the school. I was mad because people were getting sick and testing positive all over the place yet they remained open. I was mad because he came so close to freaking dying of this ridiculous disease. I was mad because he ran out of sick time and the school was not willing to help out in any way shape or form. Thankfully, we work with the most amazing people and they donated their sick time to him so he could stay home as long as he needed to. So January to March was not the greatest time for me. 

However, from spring break onward we seemed to turn a corner. In fact, the whole state seemed to turn a corner. Teachers weren't absent as much. Student weren't absent as much. Things seemed to return to a somewhat normal state. At some point the governor said that schools had to return in person (he's an asshat) and that cities could no longer mandate masks (a giant asshat). So things were starting to return to some semblance of normality and honestly, it was nice. So the last 8 weeks of the semester has been fairly uneventful and almost like a regular year. 

We are now entering the last week of school. Yay!!!!  Next week is finals, awards ceremony, and graduation, then we are done. I cannot tell you how freaking happy that makes me. I know what I'm teaching next year and I'm looking forward to planning out a normal year with normal schooling and all that nonsense. 

Looking back on this whole pandemic (not that we are out of the woods yet) this school year has really lasted 15 months. We went out in March of 2020. We had to pivot and come up with some reasonable way to finish the year out, and we did. Then we spent the entire summer planning how the new year would go. Would we start in person? Would we start online? What would teaching look like? Videos? Assignments? It was a summer of meetings and planning trying to make things as normal for the students as possible. Meanwhile we were all in lockdown so no fun was had by almost anyone. Then we start the 20-21 year online. In October, we return in person but some chose to remain online. We were creating content for both the online kids and the in person kids. It was really like doing 2 jobs and it was stressful as hell. Thankfully, admin decided that for kids who chose to remain online in the spring semester we would pay for an online school service. That literally cut our workload in half and the spring semester was far better than the fall semester. 

So that's where we are now. Finally coming to the end of a long, long school year. I, for one, am looking forward to summer. We are taking a 2 week RV trip and I'm more excited than you could possibly know. The husband is fully recovered and we are both fully vaccinated. 

So, it might be a good time to revive this blog. I'm going to introduce interactive notebooks next year for both of my preps - AGAIN!!!!! I've done them in the past but never kept up on them. But now I feel like I have a good handle on the curriculum and I'm not so stressed over what I'm going to teach every day, so I think I can do them this year. They require prep and planning and I will be able to do that this year. Plus, I only have 2 preps. Jeez, I should have tons of free time. I had 2 preps this year and really did have lots of free time in spite of what was going on around me. So I may use this space as a sounding board, organization, planner space for those notebooks. 

Writing this post was somewhat cathartic. I feel like I've gotten some things off my shoulders and now can move on. So this is now all behind me and I'm moving forward from here. Here's to an amazing summer. In 5 days this will be me: