Early birthday

I got home by 5:00 today and then Josh and I headed to Walmart. While there we had the thought about getting Josh a digital camera for his birthday. I planned to spend between $75-100 on his gift and with the price of cameras going down I thought it might be a possibility. The cheapest decent one I found was around a $100 so I figured I would give it some thought. But then they had a stand of reduced cameras and I found a Kodak 5 megapixel camera for $80 marked down from $118. So I decided to go ahead and get his birthday present early. It's a nice small camera that is very simple to use. The only drawback is that it uses regular AA batteries. I will try to get him some rechargable batteries at some point. He also needs an SD card but at least there's some internal memory to it.

My day at school was uneventful. I'm catching up on grading papers slowly. Oh, I do have something to complain about. The school has decided this grand plan of reaching out to certain students. All the teachers have been assigned 3 sophomore students in which we're supposed to mentor. We're supposed to build a relationship with them, encourage them to attend school and stress the importance of passing the TAKS. The thing is that the students we've been assigned are not in our classes. I'm lucky in that one of mine is someone I do have in one of my classes. I emailed my principal to ask him how exactly we're supposed to mentor these students that we don't have in class, don't know, and when we're supposed to do this. His response was to re-read the 3rd page of his principal's communication. I already read that and all it says is what we're supposed to do, but not how to achieve it. I am one of the lucky teacher's that has two conference periods. Even with that I still don't have time to deal with this. On top of preparing lessons, sending additional lessons to students in trouble, making parent contacts, grading papers and everything else required of us how are we supposed to take on this additional burden. If the students were those we had in class, that wouldn't be a problem and it would make sense because we could build that relationship without interrupting another teacher's class and without taking time out of our conference period.

I was at least smart enough to not bring home papers to grade tonight since I knew I'd never get to them. I still need to get some laundry done. My ex husband is being a sweetheart by writing me a quick program in access to track my hours that I've devoted outside of school to speech activities. Well, I better get a little bit done before tomorrow.