good day

Today was a good day.

Most recently, I just marked the latest batch of projects from my grade 10s, and they're mostly fantastic. I got them to write children's stories; some of them re-did exisiting stories, and others made up the stories on their own. They're not all entirely appropriate for kids, but some of them are darn funny. I'm asking to keep several, just for my own entertainment.

Just before I settled down to mark, I filed my income tax refund, and I'm getting a good chunk of change back. I *should* be able to pay off my line of credit entirely, so I'm pretty excited. Now, hopefully, I can actually start saving some money for a rainy day. Or a house, or something.

Earlier today, I was with my grade 9 class, and it was going really well. This is a big thing. The grade 9s are funny, they're pretty sweet kids, but they're really immature. Anyway, so I'm just meandering around the class, helping them with their projects (they were needing a lot of help because we started a new project today), and they're just being nice and sweet and working really well, when one of them says 'psssssst, Miss S! you have a visitor!' I looked over to the door, but there was nobody there. As I'm panning back across the classroom, I see my principal sitting at one of the corner tables in the class, taking notes. My first instinct is YARG!, but then I realized that things were going swimmingly, so I just kept doing what I was doing, and he kept doing what he was doing, and then after a while he was mysteriously gone again. I have to sidebar here. Thing one, as a first year contract teacher, I am required to be formally evaluated by the principal. If I get a positive eval., then next year I can get a permanent contract. Without the positive eval., there's no way to get one. So that's why I was a bit nervous, but I think I did well. Thing two is that my principal is like 6'7", 300lbs, so they fact that he was able to sneak in and out is pretty funny.

One last thing that didn't happen today but I forgot to mention earlier. One of my grade 12s from last semester asked me to write her a reference letter to get into art school. I had never written a reference letter before, but thanks to my best friend Google, I found some templates and apparently wrote a pretty good letter. I was talking to her the other day, and she thanked me profusely because she got in! I was so excited, it made my day. I helped someone! Like, with life! I feel good. I still don't think I want to teach art forever, but this helps to make it seem like a good thing for now.