Better?

Things continue to get very.slowly.better. It is time to start focusing on teaching, which would be wonderful and exciting if the classes didn't keep happening. I've decided to trust that there will be enough computers tomorrow and continue the unit I started 2 weeks ago. Unfortunately, I didn't really feel that the first lesson went well, due to my being underprepared and I'm not even sure what I want to cover tomorrow, never mind how. I want to come up with a plan for the unit - novel thought! - but it is late and I'm really tired. I am also starting a new unit in my other course, which is equally unplanned. I have some ideas, but if I don't come up with something more solid it will go very poorly.

It doesn't help matters in the planning department that two of the things I let slide this fall were organizational. Over the summer I had to pack my entire office into boxes when the floors were refinished. I haven't had time to unpack yet. I moved to a new computer and haven't reorganized my files. I couldn't do a direct mapping from the old to the new because I stored things in three different places. So my office and my computer are equally disorganized with piles of documents everywhere. (My office also has piles of STUFF. Like the PVC pipe I'm going to make into a binary tree. I was storing it in my classroom but I discovered that someone thought it was trash and put it outside! So I saved it from the rubbish by moving it to yet another pile in my office.)

Tomorrow is also back to school night. I was supposed to have submitted a course description by Monday. I didn't even realize it until Tuesday. So now I have until tomorrow, and can hand it out when I give my talk.

The guiltiest thing for me is the way in which I have failed the faculty. We used to have "internal" web sites - password protected (which is asinine, but that's another post). The web server died a horrible and un-backed-up death last spring. A new one was installed this summer, but with no way for anyone to actually put up web sites. Supposedly there is now a way, but last time I checked, it doesn't work. Also, the way for parents to access it doesn't work, which is a separate issue. There also needs to be a main page that has links to the various sites, which I haven't made - right now there's just a page that says "there's nothing to see here." Also, if we get it working that the faculty can update their websites - on which they post unimportant things like homework calendars and assignment requirements - I think that my page might be the main one, not my teaching page.

Did I mention that my JOB is to be a teacher? I'm suffering burnout. I'm getting increasingly frustrated when people want me to do things that are NOT my job, because no one else will do them and they should be done. Yes, I am capable, and I might be singularly capable, but at some point I really, really need the time to do MY job.

The upside is that I have a kick-ass dress to wear to BtS night tomorrow, so no matter what, I'll look fabulous.