Last Night I Didn't Get to Sleep At All...

I had to be at an instructional team leader "retreat" today so I technically had my first day back to work since summer vacation began for me. I can NEVER sleep the night before a work day. I forgot that little fact and "worked" in my sleep all night long. I am TIRED!!!

The reason I put retreat in quotation marks is because normally our "retreats" are held in the library and we do team building activities where we spin our chairs around really fast while calling out our high school nicknames until we find someone who uses the same brand of toothpaste as we do. Then we take 3 hours and 45 minutes to discuss active participation, reinvent the standards and align them with the planet Mercury while writing lesson plans for the year. After a 15 minutes break where we eat stale chocolate chip cookies, it's back to discussing closure in a lesson for 4 hours and 15 minutes and then it's lunch time. Lunch is usually a day old tortilla with day old shredded chicken and a brown piece of lettuce with a stale chocolate chip cookie for dessert. Mind you -- there are NEVER any diet sodas at these things.

So imagine my surprise when I received the email stating that we were meeting at the Tanque Verde Guest Ranch for our retreat. Granted, there was nary a diet pepsi to be found but being the wise, experienced teacher that I am, I brought along 2 cans of diet pepsi to sustain me throughout the day.

It was a good day and I will not bore you with the details except to say that my schedule for next year rocks and I like the people on the leadership team. We only discussed active participation and closure for about 45 minutes total all day, and they served us a killer lunch buffet.

Speaking of food, we went over the wellness policy and it's really incredible. Thanks, once again, to NCLB, cupcakes are no longer allowed in the classroom for a child's birthday. You can't even drink Gatorade so don't even think about it.