Learning Festival

Today my school had its annual Learning Festival. Most schools have a carnival or a school fair or something to celebrate the end of the school year. Heaven forbid we do something non-educational...so we have the Learning Festival.This is teacher language code for, "Oh shit, I have to put as much student work in the hallway as humanly possible to prove the students learned a lot this year."
Since we have the ALPS program in our school (for gifted learners) I am pretty sure that when hiring teachers, the principal of our school only hired people who display qualities of gifted-ness (not a word). Part of that is a ridiculous need to prove that we are each the best teacher in the school.
(We have some really amazing teachers in our building and I really love working with them, and I am not just saying that because they read the blog.)
I really hate this time of the year. I know it is coming, but somehow cannot remember from year to year to keep too much stuff and my room always looks barren compared to everyone else. I am thinking this is just because I have changed grades every year so I cannot plan ahead for what I am going to be teaching, let alone what I am going to display during the learning festival.

So anyway, back to the point, we had the festival today. I thought was in the afternoon. I was wrong. Very wrong. I rolled my happy little self out of bed around 11:15 because Gaby barked at me. I sent my friend a text message to double check the time of the learning festival. Guess what! I was WAY off! It started at 9:00. I still had the writing of two of my students at home because I needed to scan them into my computer for samples for my Master's program. Oops.
I took the fastest shower in the history of the world and raced to school. Slapped up the final two writing pieces. Neither of the two students asked me why their work wasn't up, so they either hadn't gone to see the display yet... or they just know me well, and figured I forgot. Ha, ha.
I saw many of my little students, didn't get attacked by any parents (yes they do attack, if you are a parent please schedule a meeting with your child's teacher if you need a conference, don't accost them in the hall), and got to eat some food. All in all, not too bad.
Now, time to do some laundry!