Feeling down.

This week was hard.

I say that every week this year, I think. But every week it's true. And maybe that's a post for another time...but right now, I'm just feeling like this week was particularly tough.

Wednesday, a student had an asthma attack at lunch. She was having trouble breathing but wasn't in terrible shape so I sent her up to the nurse with a few of her friends. A few minutes later, one of them came running back out. "Ms. Teachin', she stopped breathing! She almost fell down the stairs but we caught her!" I sent another kid to run and tell an administrator as I raced inside; I got to her just as our school health aide did. She was okay after a while, but BOY was that scary.

Thursday, two boys almost got in a fight outside my classroom. I saw them just before it started and could tell - the body language, the tension, the expressions on faces - so I started yelling at everyone around to get to class as I moved toward them. And I was YELLING. Then the pushing started, and I yelled even louder, enough that I scared the crap out of a good number of kids and I had two teachers come to check on me later to make sure I was okay. (I was fine - my basic philosophy in a fight is that I'm not getting in the middle of it, but if I can scream loud enough that they're more scared of what I'm going to do to them than they are interested in watching the fight, then they'll move away and at least not encourage any more violence. It works out okay, mostly.)

This after the incident at parent/teacher conferences last week, plus two of my favorite kids had an altercation and I'm going to lose one of them no matter what (one is probably going to transfer schools; if she doesn't, the other one will be moved off my core), plus another kid I adored withdrew because of a fight from last year, plus the Charmer's counselor called me on Thursday and I have no idea why (I called her a month or so ago just to touch base and make sure he doesn't fall through the cracks - I've done it for DC and the Eyeliner Queen as well - at the time he was apparently doing well) but probably because he's getting in serious trouble of some sort.......

I went to bed at 8:30 last night and didn't get up till 9:30 this morning. Tonight I'm going to see Zombieland and I'm going to forget about everything school-related.

Because gah.

(Photo credit to whatmegsaid)