Maxing out Productivity

Today marked the second day this week where I have been very productive and then crashed. This seems to happen to me a lot. I'll have a period of several hours where I get a ton of things done and then I'm so proud of myself for doing all that that I kick back and do nothing for the rest of the day. The first day was Sunday. I had a great morning cleaning, getting laundry done, dishes cleaned. I went grocery shopping at Sam's Club and then hit up Target to get some prescriptions filled (my doctor told me it was the cheapest place in Lynchburg to go). Now before you say anything, yes, I am a single girl and I shop at Sam's. I felt a little silly at first considering I live alone and everyone in there seems to be buying food for an entire football team. I love going there though. I LOVE getting shopping done and knowing I won't have to run out for toothpaste or toilet paper or Kleenex for a long time. (When the Swine Flu was making it's way through my classes, my students were especially grateful for the endless supply of Kleenex). Sam's also has a lot of items you can't get anywhere else. They have unbelievable salsa that I am in love with and I discovered this weekend they also have INCREDIBLE chicken salad. I am a sucker for good chicken salad. I especially like it with craisins or grapes in it. Anyway, I finished shopping at Sam's in a very good mood and happy with my purchases. I also had picked up two crates of water and one of Gatorade for my schools "Hope for Haiti" drive. Each grade level is assigned an essential item to bring. So far we have a pretty amazing show from a school made up of kids who don't really have much to begin with. On my way to my car I was asked by a group of people if I wanted to donate money to support the local Boy Scouts. I was about to politely decline and keep walking when I thought about my boyfriend, the Eagle Scout who has just signed up to volunteer as an assistant scoutmaster with the local boy scout troop in Monterey. I ended up buying the most AMAZING locally made wheat bread and raspberry jam. Between the cleaning, the laundry and the groceries, I got back and just crashed. Played some Wii, hung out online, made some phone calls, watched TV. I was very lazy for the second half of the day.

The same thing happened today after school. I had a very successful day at work and think my kids really enjoyed my "Family Feud" style review. I got a surprise observation yesterday by my principal, which went better than I thought it would. I don't mind being observed at all as much as I used to, which is good. It was actually a pretty good feeling to compare today to the last time he observed me back in September. It's crazy how much more comfortable I feel with the kids and the content. I can't believe I've almost made it to March of my first year! But I digress. I had a very productive day at work. During my planning period, I ran off copies of my test and uploaded it onto the Test Information System (TIS) database we're supposed to use. Many of the veteran teachers complain about TIS, but I've been using programs like it for as long as I've been teaching. It is a pain to upload the test, make an answer key and align every question with a state standard, but in the end I find it very useful. It graphs and aggregates all the data. You can see how your students did by class, by question, by standard. Not to mention, when you have a particularly successful test (like my last unit on the Industrial Revolution and European Imperialism) you get beautiful graphs like these!



I never knew looking at a graph could make me so happy, but seeing these truly puts me in the best mood. I'm also proud to report that one of the students who recorded in the 60's now has a 91 average in my class. She has worked her tale off this six weeks and I am so proud of her! Anyway, the two other history teachers in my school were both complaining about how they have not used TIS at all (it was a yearly objective for every teacher this year) and were actually asking ME for advice! I could hardly believe it. Anyway, I got all the test info uploaded, I added all the students, printed out the bubble sheets and am all good to go for tomorrow. My government class is finally going to finish playing State of the Union bingo, which we started playing back in January. I could hardly believe when we finally came back after almost 2 whole weeks off from school and they all remembered exactly what we were doing. Every class kept asking, "when are we going to finish State of the Union bingo??" Now, I'm no dummy. I know they love it because it is a pretty mindless exercise and they don't have to do much. But for some of the kids, this will probably be the only State of the Union they ever watch. I'm offering a running commentary while it plays, explaining who is who and where the Supreme Court is, explaining many of the things Obama talks about. I think it will be a great way to wrap up the Executive Branch.

So back to how productive I was. This morning a friendly neighbor left a post-it note on my car to remind me that my inspection sticker expired last night so after school I took it to a local garage and got that taken care of (thanks again, apartment 109!) I also scheduled checkups for both my cats at the vet, and graded all my senior government papers. By 4 PM I was so proud of all that I had accomplished over the past couple days that I just checked out completely. I played some more Wii, snacked on some Tostitos and yummy Sam's Club salsa and did some blog surfing. I officially got JC hooked on blogging and am patting myself on the back for that. He starts his language classes today, which means his schedule is about to get pretty busy. I have to say I have enjoyed having him around all the time. Flexible schedules aren't exactly common in the military. Neither of us know what to expect from the language school and what his days will be like so it will be an adventure. All I know is T-40 days and a wake up until I head out to California to see him! As I have tomorrow all planned out, I think I'm going to veg out tonight and either watch the Olympics and the Office or my new DVD, Brothers At War. I can't decide.

Do you ever max out on productivity? Do you feel like after you accomplish a lot you deserve to reward yourself by relaxing? or do you just like to keep the productivity going?