This week has been nothing short of exhausting. But today felt productive in more ways than one. That’s because I used up my three periods to finish the marking of my sixth graders’ spelling. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have taken so long, but I got them to pen a personal response to a potential Oral topic using the collocations I had curated for them to study. Not unexpectedly, many of them did not know how to apply my thoughtfully generated collocations, so I went the extra mile to write 1-2 sentences for EVERY.ONE.OF.THEM.

Having gotten one class of spelling marking out of the way, I figured that the rest are just details. So, I resolutely left my fourth graders’ spelling books in the classroom and dashed like an arrow after dismissal — to the warm embrace of Long John Silver. Then, I went home, watched “The Boyfriend”, savoured my beer, and napped.

The nap was refreshing enough for me to resume my marking on the bus ride to pick up the son. Finished one class of marking on reported speech. Upon arriving at school, I then had a stroke of inspiration and outsourced my son’s testing of the 220 Dolch List words to a fifth grader. I started the marking of my sixth graders’ photosynthesis worksheets in the meantime. 10
minutes came and gone — and I learnt that my boy doesn’t know to read words like “shall” and “upon”.

So, today was a productive day in which I managed to clear various tasks, personal and professional alike.