how did i celebrate the beginning of my winter break, you ask?

while most of my counterparts (with the exception of a few) had cleared out of the school by about 3:37 this afternoon, i was still there.  wow, sarah.  you must be thinking to yourself.  what a dedicated teacher you are to want to hang out with students crashing from their daylong candy-cane highs after the bell has wrung.  oh how i wish i were and that i could claim such a sentiment.

but yeah, no.  that is not why my little civic was one of the lone cars left in the lot after the last bus had left.  in fact, if you had driven by my school this afternoon you probably would have been perplexed to see the teacher standing on a chair in the middle of the parking lot digging through the recycle bin/dumpster.  that teacher?  yep.  you guessed it.  me.

i won't bore you with the details or an admission of how much of this may have been my fault.  instead, all you really need to know is that i had a box sitting near my recycling boxes today.  the box that was NOT paper for recycling was FILLED and i mean FILLED with the projects that my students had spent pretty much the entire week working on.  and oh yeeeeeeeeaaaaah!  i also had about $200 worth of curriculum materials loaded in that box as well . . . so you can imagine the freak out that occurred when i realized the students in my 7th period had taken THE WRONG BOX during their weekly save the earth mission . . . and why i absolutely HAD to go digging through the recycling bin this afternoon.

so probably not how many people would choose to celebrate a two week break from the insanity that is my job lately.  but that is how i spent my afternoon . . . 

in an unrelated note: my 7th period will be studying "common sense and how to find some" when we get back from the break.

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 side note: all of the curriculum materials were found in my rummaging, as well as a good amount of the projects.  not all, but it'll do.  so thanks for the concern, but you can totally breathe now.