oh my god. My day began at 6am when I woke up to finish piecing together the orgo presentation for my class. Did not come back to my room until 9:30, after studyhall. How did it go? Great for the first 20 minutes and then the administrator who was observing me left and chaos entered. It ended with me yelling FOUR ETHYL TWO METHYL PROPANE like it was a call for the messiah to save me from the depths of hell. So I have written a few commandments for Tamar's Orgo Class which includes #4 There will be no learning or teaching of Chinese while Tamar teaches orgo. The Coy One, spent maybe all of my class period learning the fundaments of Mandarin. Finally I yelled at him and asked him to name the alkane I had written on the board. Silence. Well, can you at least name it in Chinese, for us? At the end of the lesson he had learned no orgo, but a surprising amount of Mandarin, enough to apologize to me with the correct grammar, intonations, inflections, etc. It's frustrating. He's one of the best students in the class, but when I'm in charge it's constantly, Tamar, can I ask you a non-chemistry related question? Last night in the middle of studyhall, while I was trying to answer three questions at once (as usual) he stood up, pointed to the window, and said: Tamar! Look at the sunset, isn't it amazing? At that point I exchanged glances with the girl sitting by me... the girl who may no longer be in my class...

Which brings me to reason #2 as to why today was so exciting. But that is a whole other story I won't get into.

All boils down to my failure today as a TA on two separate occasions. Couldn't keep my kids in line enough to ram some simple organic chemistry down their throats and couldn't maintain enough peace in the classroom to keep a little teenage crush from developing into an intensely traumatic drama.

Today's fortune: "Good things are on their way."