I couldn't get work off my mind. Sounds pathetic. Sounds like I am a workaholic. Sounds like I have no life but to go over every measurement I have made within the past 24 hours, creating lovely designs for people's artwork. Designs that they want by Christmas and there is no room for error in case needs be a re-order. But seriously. It's a big deal. I can't believe over the past 10 months that I have found something that I love so much.
When my student-teaching ended in November I was more than a little relieved. The students were awesome and there were only two classes out of six that I dreaded because they tended to have the most social 8th graders in them. Being so social, they were also the poorest in their academic success making it hard to keep them focused on anything more than who was crushing on who. These two classes also had the lowest reading levels in them. Which I found interesting. Reading is so important to an education that it shows up as missing in all kinds of subjects. You can be crappy at math and no one knows it except in math class. Can't sound out a word correctly and you've got problems in more than just English.
Mostly I was relieved to not have to make lesson plans anymore. Which I found fairly interesting as I started subbing that middle school is definitely it's own lesson criteria. Elementary lessons are from a number of books, pages photo copied and handed out to the class. By the time high school rolls around handouts aren't as popular 'cause it costs two trees and a couple of branches to print papers for 150 students a day. Books are used alongside notebook paper that had better have the annoying spiral bits peeled off before being handed in. But in middle school you've gotta come up with your own criteria. No book tells you how to teach a 8th grader. No book says, "This is what they ought to know and this how to make sure they know it." Nope. A lot of it you have to come up with on your own. I used a handout from a book twice in the four months that I taught. The rest was dreamed up in Microsoft Word, including grammar sheets, questions about the current novel and health activities that were supposed to make kids aware of what was going on around them.
If there is anything I believe, I believe that there is an amount of time allotted to everything and if that time is too short than you're taking too long. I could have spent hours making lesson plans. To keep things under control I did my health lesson plans at night after getting home from school and I did my English lesson plans in my prep hour. Therefore nothing could take more than a hour to get together because I had to make dinner in the evening and in the morning, class started at 9:10 whether I had my copies made or not. I admit, it was a little stressful, but I don't look back and regret spending too much time making things just perfect, which easily could have become a problem.
After playing the subbing game for a couple of months I needed something a little more substantial. Believe me, there's nothing better for a little ego-pat than teaching a group of third graders. They love you to death and make pictures for you to hang on your fridge during their free time. Sometimes a girl just needs something a little more steady in her life than constantly checking the sub website for openings or waiting for a call that may not come until 8 a.m. the next morning and you are needed in the school at 8:40.
I spent a whole day filling out job applications online. It's certainly tedious and there has never been a time when I have filled out more online resumes and questionaires except when applying for college. I applied to all the places that I loved to shop and I definitely could not be more happy than where I am right now. If I had gotten what I had thought I had wanted I could be picking up dressing rooms day after day and folding and re-folding clothes on display. It would not be something that I would especially love, but how could I have really known? I'd never worked in retail before.
Instead I get to work with people and colors and see all kinds of artwork. It's the best thing ever and I am going to have a really hard time leaving when this baby comes. Like every job there are good days and there are better days, but unlike every job, there aren't too many horrible, no good days where I want to toss it to the wind and go home early. It's too much fun. If I am not designing a frame combination with a customer than I am assembling an order. It's like crafting all day. Which isn't so good 'cause when I get home the last thing I want to do is pull out some paper or a glue gun, but it really is fun. And when you spend 8 hours away from home you may as well love what you are doing.
And because I am awesome at what I do, I have a hard time accepting that I may have messed up. Even when it's not my fault. Which makes it even worse 'cause there's no way that I can fix it. Like an order that gets a notice that the mat is out of stock. Or a frame is out of stock. It's messy business having a customer come in and have to choose something different because usually the first choice is never as good as the second. And the reason I can't get this one order out of my head is because this nice lady placed three orders and two out of the three have come back with notices that the above has happened. At different times. And then I may have deleted the wrong order when I went to re-order her second best choice. And I also may have not have ordered the right size for the piece that I thought it was and the worst part, I may have misplaced a piece of artwork while we were shuffling things around, trying to match the blue in the flowers to a second blue mat 'cause the first became out of stock. And now I am worried that it got tossed whilst in a cardboard sleeve where it was supposed to be protected. And that is why, after a bathroom trip and all my water and a couple of tums I am still awake, raking my brain for any kind of consolation that everything is just fine.
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