My terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

I left this morning around 7:10 a.m. for a meeting at school. This is extremely early for me to be awake and out of the house, but it was a required meeting for all full- and part-time faculty. I figured it had to be pretty important. A new high school principal? Nice bonuses for everyone? Some other huge and shocking news?

On my way to school I got stuck in exactly eight minutes of Pine Richland High School/910 detour traffic. Argh. I ended up arriving late for the meeting. Now, that wasn't too bad because I was only the third person in the room, so apparently everyone else was late too.

It turns out that the purpose of the meeting was to review the procedures for turning in quarter grades. We've been using an online grading system called renweb for about three years. Toward the end of each quarter, the office puts out an instruction sheet on how to load your grades from your online grade book into the students' report cards. The instructions are simple, step-by-step, and include pictures. The purpose of this meeting was to show us how to do the steps on the instruction sheet! So the presenter (who did a fine job) had her laptop hooked up to a projector and walked us through the steps. For new teachers who aren't familiar with renweb, maybe the meeting was beneficial. But talk about poking pins in my eyes!!! I actually did learn two things, though. One thing about recording attendance and one thing about using renweb with vista. But worth getting up that early for? Hardly.

But the worst part of the day was that ISAIAH BIT ONE OF MY PIANO STUDENTS!!! I was shocked and horrified. He bit the 10-year-old girl on her arm hard enough to leave a black and blue mark. I don't know why he did it. Clearly he was overwhelmed by having all the extra kids in the house, and walked around whining and crying the whole time they were here. It just seemed like he was having an off day, but to BITE a kid?!? This was awful. So as soon as they left I spanked him (which I had never really done before) and put him in bed and told him not to even think about getting out of bed. That was an hour ago and I haven't heard from him since. I'm assuming he's sleeping.

Thankfully this is a family that I've been teaching for seven years, and I have a great relationship with them. That is until TODAY!! Oh goodness. Can you imagine if it had been a new student? Oh the horror! Well I guess that's the end of teaching lessons at my house for a while. Clearly my kid can't be trusted. It will mean more evenings out of the house, but oh well!

So that has been my bad day so far. And it's only 12:30 p.m. Argh.