my brain is fried

The preschool/daycare where I work had its annual assessment today. Lucky me! My class was chosen for observation! (I realize inflection can be difficult to read in print form...that should be read in a very sarcastic tone.)

It really wasn't too terribly awful. I only had 4 kids in my class and they were pretty well-behaved (at least while our "company" was with us). The only mishaps I can actually recall from today were Z spilling his milk all over him at lunch (I had to leave the other 3 unattended at the table while I took him to the bathroom and found his extra clothes) and J blowing chunks right after a great big lunch of beef fingers (which technically happened during my lunch break after my observation was over, but the woman was still in my room). If anything else happened, I've successfully repressed the memory.

We won't know our scores until after they are completely finished with our assessment. And since the school-age class was not assessed today (the person assigned to that observation was in the hospital), that could be a while.

Good Grief!

Take one week off of work and all hell breaks loose! Crap had been slowly building up for quite a while now, but last week while I was gone it all finally hit the fan. 5 teachers quit and another gave notice that this would be her last week. What happened???

From what I can gather, some teachers were called on the carpet for being on their cell phones and not paying attention to the kids on the playground. Things may or may not have been properly handled. Certain parties may or may not have negatively influenced others with lies and malicious gossip. Some simply walked out in the middle of the day. Others quit. One was actually let go. One may have come back the next day begging for her job back. A couple had reasons for quitting that were completely unrelated to the situation at hand.

I don't know all the details. What I DO know is that I have one week to prepare my class for their preschool graduation ceremony that the administration decided on a whim the day before my vacation to put together. And I still have to finish those scrapbooks for my kids and burn 12 copies of picture cds before then. And then I have another week and a half to get my room and class ready for our center's annual assessment. And with my whopping 2 years of experience, I am now the senior staff member in the preschool age group at our center.

Good thing I was on vacation last week. I probably would have ended up being caught up in the drama if I had been here. And I'm still so relaxed from that week off that even though we were short-staffed yesterday, nothing was getting to me...I think my mind is still firmly planted on a beach towel watching the dolphins parade by.