ticks and crosses

it's the second to last week of the skool term and we are just. so. tired. the house is a bombsite and we're all existing from one crockpot dinner to another. thank the universe for clothes dryers which, incidentally, i feel a bit unsave-the-earth-y using so much, but it seems that save-the-sanity is tipping the balance this week.

on the way home late from skool after cinderella rehearsal last nite, my kiddos were all exciiiited about the prospect of buying candy floss at skool which is the latest fundraiser for japan, and i immediately thought of bribing them a cunning plan, baldrick, which is to offer payment for stuffs - you know - the vacuuming's worth $2 and the clean out of the cutlery drawer and the nefarious bottom drawer's worth another $2 etc. yeah, i'm such a cheapsKATE, and it didn't even work cos they're just. so. tired. maybe i'll just shout the candyfloss anyway? yeah, i probably will, cos i'm a walkover nice like that.

after dinner, sir and i wound up back at skool, where he spent two hours planning three hours' teaching cos he's on a course today and his seventeen year old stats kids are drowning in scatter plots and other such brain-glazing-over stuffs. i wound up at my desk, getting increasingly depressed over all the assessments we're doing to these beautiful children, and as i was stamping foreheads with the new tiger-elephant-giraffe stamps i bought when we all went to the zoo and filled out worksheets, i heard the shawty song - and my silly switch flipped.

i grabbed an unsuspecting icecream container and whammed it on my head and michael-jackson-ed along the hallway until i reached the skool foyer where a hundred little people were grooving the night away for a fundraiser for the senior students' fiji trip. and i danced to the chorus of 'hi, miss!!!'. it was hilarious - the only dancing teacher in the room - i was a magnet for my technogirls - and they quickly formed a circle and started copying my mooooves. which was hysterical really, cos i dance like yer daddy - waving my arms randomly in the air and twirling around in circles, with the occasional attempt at 'the twist' when shawty gets low low low low (computer keeps typing 'love' instead of 'low') but it was totally the best fifty five seconds of my day.

and when i returned to my desk and depression, my heart continued to beat loudly for the next fifty five minutes while i dreamed up positive things to say to my scientists, who've had three assessments on The Living World. we've had science for less than 20 hours. yeah, an individual presentation on an organism (careful how you say that word - i tripped up on it yesterday and we all dissolved in hoots of laughter), a group presentation after the zoo visit, and the ubiquitous end of topic test. shoot me now. cos look, kids, see those eleventy billion post-its on the wall? that's all the amazing new stuffs we've learned together and no one's measuring that.