Help from a Neighbor

So today I came to a realization. One of the teachers at my school had a pep-talk with me in the hallway. As I was delivering the finest lining-up orders to my students, she invited me to plan for next week with her afterschool tomorrow. Of course, I agreed and told her that I was going to go home tonight and put together a draft lesson plan for the week.

Then, she stopped me and asked, "Why?"

"Matthew," she said, "this week is stressful enough. You have the whole year, there's no need in getting all stressed-out this first week. Go home tonight and work on tomorrow's lesson, but not next week's."

Normally, my TFA-brainwashing would have taken over and blocked Senora Rivera out, but real-world Matthew kicked in and thought she made a lot of sense. Why get overwhelmed with next week now?

So, I've finally found the calm that I've been looking for the past few days. I'm working on tomorrow's lesson and taking the rest of the week one day at a time. I'll work on next week's lessons tomorrow and Thursday and have them ready to go by my Friday deadline, but no need in stressing about them tonight.

I actually got to watch an episode of "West Wing" with ALL of my roommates tonight. Rare for us all to be in the same room at the same time, and even rarer to be watching our favorite show during the week - we would normally have agreed that there's just too much work to do.

But today is different - today was a good day. Especially because we got a free dryer from the band director at Miller. That's great news, since the one that we bought a few weeks ago off Craig's list decided it would die as soon as we plugged it in.

Back to experimental variables and world geography...