Friday the 13th was a productive day at the office

It didn't occur to me until after midnight last night that yesterday was Friday the 13th. Luckily nothing bad happened to me, and it was actually a pretty good day.

Yesterday I spent nearly the whole school day cleaning out my office. I thought I'd already brought a lot of stuff home, but man, was I wrong. I still had tons of things to pack up and put in my car. I also went through two of the drawers in my file cabinet. One of them is the drawer I've been using regularly all year, and it's filled with all of my current students' files. I went through each one of them, cleaned out their files so that there were no duplicate reports, and then refiled all of my graduating students and students who had been discharged or moved during the school year into the drawer with all of the inactive students' files.

Then I started going through the inactive students' files drawer again. I had started going through it on Tuesday, and it had been filled to the max, with files even stuck into the sides because there was no more room. By the time I'd left Tuesday evening, I'd only gotten an eighth of the way through, and had shredded four bins worth of stuff. Yesterday I got through the remaining 175 files, and once I was finally done, the drawer was only half full. Whoo hoo! Unfortunately, the shredder couldn't quite keep up with my overzealousness. I'd been periodically shredding stacks of papers, trying to give the shredder regular rest periods, but I could only shred about four bins worth before it would poop out on me for about 45 minutes. I kept switching off, back and forth, between cleaning and shredding, but by the end of the day, when our administrators kicked us all out and made us go home, I still had a foot-high stack of stuff to shred. I guess that will have to wait until August.

I did have a lot to show for the day, though: two clean file drawers, six huge garbage bags of shreddings, a clean and empty office, and a completed IEP to which the parent actually showed up! This was a student for whom we had tried several times to hold an IEP, but the parent kept not showing up. In our district, we are allowed to hold the IEP without the parent present, if at least three attempts are made to have the parent attend. So we (the inclusion teacher, the general education classroom teacher, and I) finally held the meeting on our third attempt in February, without the parent. However, towards the end of the school year, the dad called the inclusion teacher and asked when his child's meeting was going to be held. I would have been annoyed as all heck, but the inclusion teacher was nice and very accommodating, and agreed to hold another meeting so we could inform the parent as to the child's progress and the goals we had made for this year. We were stoked that he actually showed up yesterday, and right on time! At the end of the day, though, I never did get to those progress reports. I guess I know what I'll be working on this weekend.