Well Enough to Work

 After missing a week of school due to slow to respond, infected diverticulitis, I spent the first weekend of my spring break catching up on the grading I had at home from before my absence but had been too ill to worry about. On Monday I drove myself to school (the first time I had driven in over a week) to trade out scored papers for those that were turned in during my week-long absence.

My desk was a sea of papers, mostly the sub notes I had sent and extra copies. So many extra copies... because a quarter of my class missed part of the week I missed for their extended spring break trips. There's going to be a heck of a lot of work to chase on the other side of spring break.

I got to see the Easter mosaic pictures students started the week before I got sick. Most are still works in progress, but three students finished. And now I know I have to plan time for the rest of the class to complete theirs.

I figured it wasn't fair to measure where staples and paperclips are increasing the width, but it's still a pretty hefty stack of work for my spring break. It was important to me to get in early in the week so I could begin sorting through the work students submitted in my absence. Ideally, they would have started their spring break knowing what they owed me and I would have started mine without much (if any) grading to do. But that wasn't in the cards this year. Fortunately, I found several sets of already scored papers, the grammar and spelling assignments, within the stack. I also didn't write anything too demanding into my sub plans. Other than needing to reread the chapters they read in our novel, Lunch Money by Andrew Clements, to ensure I remember what happened before looking at their worksheets, it's all pretty quick to score.

My friend and co-worker left an answer key for the math review sheet she created (yes, created!) and test she administered that had all the work shown. Since I'm still not 100% well, that was incredibly helpful for my sanity. But the best part about the math test was that she told early finishers to "draw pretty pictures for Mrs. Conrow on the back."

I am still recovering. It's disappointing to give my spring break over to recovery and catch-up work, but it's a lot better than needing to take two weeks off in a row, and huge orders of magnitude better than needing emergency surgery... which was an eventuality the urgent care doctor was preemptively planning for during my first visit.