CITIUS. ALTIUS. FORTIUS.
I had an Olympic-ally bad day Thursday. Everything sucked, and it sucked faster,
higher, and stronger than usual. It was,
in short, a gold medal fail.
Let me start at the beginning.
I haven't been sleeping well, so I am forcing myself to stay
up later to possibly sleep for longer stints.
So far, it's working. I'm
sleeping five hours straight … but that's all
I'm sleeping. Over the last three
nights, I have totaled about thirteen hours of sleep, but I've only gotten up a
couple of times to aimlessly walk the floor.
This morning I wake up, after getting another 4+ hours of
sleep (I went to bed at 11:45, woke up at 12:30 with a weird nightmare about a
sub shop, but the people I was with were wearing butcher aprons/clothing and
covered in blood … don't ask … I'm sure it's not healthy), and I decide that
maybe I should get my lazy ass out of bed and get going. You see, some mornings there are repeats of
old CSI: Miami episodes that end at
5:30 a.m. followed immediately by The
Three Stooges. That's a lot of
cheesy dialogue to resist, and some mornings run later than others. If it's a Shemp morning, the TV goes right
off, but if it's a Moe, Curly, and Larry morning, I might be tempted.
This morning I'm just not into it. I watch and rewatch the news, as if it's
actually going to change and maybe it's not really going to rain later and then
be totally crappy. I am running a little
late because I decide to wash my hair, make a lunch, check my email, and
because, to be honest, I'm just not into my job right now. There's a lot of stupid bullshit going on;
I'm totally burnt. I realize as I am
getting dressed that my pants are blue but my shirt is black. I go to change pants and realize that no
black pants are clean. Suck.
Okay, fine, then.
I'll put a black jumper-style dress on over my black shirt because
changing the shirt just seems like too much work. Halfway through getting the dress on, the
zipper gets stuck. I work it back down
and try again. And again. And again until I realize that this time the
zipper is truly jammed and I am stuck partially in and out of this dress. I manage to get the top half off, spin the
dress around, work at the zipper, and somehow crawl out of the damn thing. Shit.
At this point, I am still not willing to change my
shirt. Again, it just seems like I'm
already that far, why not just keep going.
So I pull out my crappy gray pants, big old New Balance gray sneakers, a
gray sweater, and call it an outfit.
Good to go. Of course, now I have
stockings, a slip, and a half-zipped dress littering my room. Fuck it.
I'll take care of it all when I come home later.
Even though I am starting my day about ten minutes behind
schedule, I still manage to find a decent parking space at school. I back along the sidewalk. The kids only walk near that edge of the lot
when there's a fire drill. No one is
going to touch my car. It's fine. I'm sure it's fine. Of course it's fine. Only a fire drill…. Right? How often do those things happen, right? Last year we only had one, right?
I get into school and remember the marionette show is coming today. I looooove the marionette show. Two people create this incredible show about Greek myths, and the kids are totally fascinated by the theatrics. We have a modified schedule, and we're all supposed to take our classes to the caf at exactly 8:55; the social studies classes go down early at 8:50, so they're already there. I start walking my class out the door at exactly 8:55 when…
Luckily, only three kids are out in the hall ahead of
me. "STOP!" I scream. "COME BACK INSIDE!" Holymotherfuckingshit,
it's a fucking fire drill in the middle of our passing time to the
assembly. WTF. Within seconds I instruct them, "Do
NOT go to the caf. Immediately proceed
out the front door and outside to the flag pole. Stay together, people, and watch for me. I'll raise my hand high in the air so you can
see me. GO, GO, GO!"
That's right. The one
time I park along the sidewalk of the lot is the one time we have a fire drill
so the kids can get their paws all over and lean up against my car. Damnit.
Somehow one of my students gets separated from our class and
panics. She cannot find me in the mess
of people. Of course she cannot find me; I'm shorter than the students are. It only takes thirty seconds for us to reconnect,
and then we are directed back into the building. All I can think of is how those poor
puppeteers must've felt -- "Our livelihood going down in a middle school
fire! Greek tragedy show ends in
flames!" Oh, the irony.
Say fucking what?
The commenter brings me to the room and opens the folder,
the students' folder, the one they open to find their work, the one sitting
accessibly on a desk. There are no
worksheets, no study guides, no notes, no copies of the story for the kids to
use for review… just the copy of my test, on pink paper, with all of the
multiple choice options and matching and true/false all clearly marked with the
answers that I wrote out. A copy of my original. From my file
cabinet.
At this point, I go ape-fucking-shit ballistic. I yank the test out of the folder and start raging
through the hallways. I am so mad that I
can quite honestly feel the heat rising off of my body. I open the closed caf doors, for the
marionette show is in progress, and motion to one of my teammates. As I start to tell him that
I have to skip the assembly so I can type up a new test for tomorrow and why I must do this, I almost start crying. This scares the shit out of him as he has rarely seen me in tears, maybe once last year when an undermining teammate nearly broke my spirit with two days left of school.
I have to skip the assembly so I can type up a new test for tomorrow and why I must do this, I almost start crying. This scares the shit out of him as he has rarely seen me in tears, maybe once last year when an undermining teammate nearly broke my spirit with two days left of school.
I cannot believe I have to re-create this entire exam. I am so angry that I am spitting nails, maybe even razor blades … hell, I think I might be spitting rockets. By the time the assembly is over, I have re-written and re-created and re-worked 1/3 of the test, only it's a much more complicated and difficult test. It kills me because now I have to punish all the students at the hands of the cheaters.
This isn't me; this isn't how my mind works; this isn't my way to take out my anger on the children. I'm not sure what choice I have, though, except to make the test all mish-mash and throw questions out of order, change up multiple choice options, add more items, and throw all the vocabulary terminology together onto one page.
So much for academic integrity on my end and on the end of
the staff member who was showing my test around.
The good news is that the test is still on the exact
material I told the kids would be on it.
I still have all of my handwritten original test questions, so I can
write all over the draft and write nasty notes and check marks and arrows. And, to be truthful, parts of the reworked
test will be better because things like conflict and similes and metaphors are
in a separate section away from the story plot.
Maybe, just maybe, this is a good thing after all. Of course, I have to finish it up, check my
work, check the answers, create a lower-level version of the test for the
second-level classes, and I have to get everything copied. The funniest part of this is that I copied
the original test, all 5 pages of it, twice by accident. So I have two hundred copies of the old test. Now I will also have 100 copies of the new
test.
300 copies of a test on a story about Greek Olympic athletes
in ancient times: It's almost
comical. Almost. Citius, Altius, Fortius. The Olympic motto -- Faster, Higher, Stronger. Right now the only thing going faster, higher, and stronger is my goddamned blood pressure.
I manage to get everything done, checked, re-checked, copied, stapled, hole-punched, and ready, and I lock everything up in a file cabinet, the new 100 along with the original 100 and the copied 100. I have the frigging Spartan 300 in my damn file drawer. Be strong, little Spartan exams, be strong. Your time will come in about fifteen hours.
I leave work late, get home, and decide I would like nothing
more than a blender drink, a nice margarita, to make me feel better. Since I missed lunch working on the test, I
eat my lunch while sipping a margarita.
Okay, sipping is probably not
the correct term, but sucking in
intravenously makes me sound slightly alcoholic. It doesn't help that I spill a small bit of
Jose Cuervo Especial on the counter and nearly start crying again. "Oh, no!" I wail, "Jose
down. JOSE DOWN!"
I do feel calmer at the moment. I am away from work, I have the new test
locked away safely, and I have just over seven work hours left until April
break starts. I can do this; I can sooo
do this. After all, I've touched
Olympians before (though that sounds so wrong on many levels). Okay, they used me as a throwing dummy when
they were getting ready for the Olympics in judo, but still. That's closer than most people have come to
Olympia. When I leave school at the end of the day, an hour later than everyone else, with a throbbing headache that could take down a horse, I realize how much better it is that I knew about the cheating, or the "special prepping," the day BEFORE the test and not the day OF nor AFTER.
That knowledge, plus the effects of the margarita, plus the exhaustion from sleeplessness, clothing malfunctions, fire drills, missed lunch, and everything else that has chosen to go down the shit-hole today, has made me a better person, right?
What doesn't kill us makes us stronger, right?
CITIUS. ALTIUS. FORTIUS.
Right?
Bite me. It has just been one of those days.
