Symptoms of a Busy Life

These last few days have been the longest I have gone without blogging since I started this blog over three years ago. The reason: two concurrent Brave Writer classes that are eating up all my time--and I mean ALL my time. I basically pulled an all-nighter last night evaluating rough drafts for my literary analysis class; my head finally hit the pillow just before 5:00 AM this morning. I was up at 7:30 and was at our homeschool co-op Class Days before 10 AM. Fortunately, my dear friend and incredible poet Kathryn Belsey was Special Guest Poet for my 4th-6th grade Poetry Class, and my high school writing students were doing read-arounds with the rough drafts of their MLA research papers. After running errands, I came home, put away groceries, changed clothes, and was back on my laptop, working on my Brave Writer classes again, posting responses to my Shakespeare class which is studying Hamlet and replies to my Literary Analysis students.

I have never worked so much for any class as I have for the Literary Analysis course--six weeks of 4-5 hours per day minimum, six days per week. For the past two weeks with both classes running concurrently I have been working 12-15 hours/day, seven days/week. We've been "unschooling" so that I don't have to be actively involved in the younger two kids' home schooling; we'll pick back up this coming week when I only have my Shakespeare class to teach. And perhaps I'll have a chance to sleep...sometime in mid-June.

Rough draft conferences start next week; I'll be meeting with all ten of my high school co-op students to go over their MLA rough drafts with them, one-on-one. I also need to grade the incoming essays from the Literary Analysis course at Brave Writer plus keep up with the third of four weeks of the Shakespeare class.

My dreams of lying on the beach watching the kids surf and swim out of one eye while reading a mystery novel with the other seem rather distant. E and I have a plan to head to the beach for a weekend soon--although I will most likely have a stack of MLA research papers to grade while she cleans my parents' home in preparation for their homecoming from Hawaii after my dad's open heart surgery earlier this month. But even grading essays at the beach is practically a vacation compared to watching lovely spring days slip by, one after the other, while I work on my online courses for twelve hours or more each day.

So I hope to be back to posting here soon--and I wish you all a blessed Ascension Day!