LAT

Came up with a new entry for the New Revised Teacher's Dictionary. Today was a LAT day. Now maybe that doesn't mean much for people outside of my district, but inside our little circle, LAT usually stands for Linguistically Accommodated Testing. These are the tests that our newcomer kids take in leiu of the TAKS test.

However, today was LAT day in the sense that it was Long Ass Thursday.

I walked into my room this morning and checked my mini-thermometer (hey, we were studying temperature measurement last week) -- 80 degrees. That just ain't right.

The temp didn't improve much throughout the day, even with the "air conditioning" blowing -- really just moving room temp air around -- and several windows open.

When I picked my kids up from specials class in the afternoon, several of them were in tears because there had been a fight outside, and one of them was even getting suspended! I totally expect one class of 3rd graders to be fighting, because they are just a bunch of idiots and don't care. But I would never have guessed that this suspended girl would have gotten involved, and she claims she WASN'T. Of course, not having been witness, I had no idea what had actually happened, so I wasn't able to say one way or the other.

This being (Long Ass) Thursday, we had after school tutoring, so that was a fun hour.

Afterwards, as I walked out of the school to the parking lot, I noticed that the air seemed really thick and smokey. Turns out there are wild fires raging through North Texas! The air was full of ash and very dense. Guess I won't have to worry about fights outside at recess tomorrow, since I don't think there will BE an outside recess tomorrow.

To top it all off, I came home to find that my DVR had died, taking all of my stored programming with it. Guess I'll have to check out this hulu.com after all...