Breakfast: One cupcake, one banana, one bowl of oatmeal.

Goal for the day: Try not to get wrecked behind schedule. Today is the last day of encoding of grades.

The tasks: Apart from the standard five periods of high-octane teaching, I need to do do at least five of the nine tasks that I listed. They range from completing my grade inputs into the student portal to helping with some production aspects in this year’s school musical.

I have finally double-checked my papers the other day. Such are the rigors of teaching; once a task is done, another one comes.

Luckily, the third trimester has already started.

Still, I wanted to make sure that my grades are totally checked 100%, without any missing entries. Sure enough, I’m just a subject teacher…but the burden of ensuring that my students’ marks are entered properly solely belong to me. I am quite aware that if I do any missing links, then at least I’ll expect a couple of personal visits during the parent-teacher conference.

I know that micromanagement has never been one of my strengths; heck, it shows up even when I play strategy games as I put whatever functions the computer can handle to “automatic mode”, so that I wouldn’t have to watch over every single detail at the same time.

But endure I must.

Well, by and by, we endured. I was able to jot my grades into the portal later in the morning and all I could say was that I breathed a sigh of relief.

Lunch: Was that beef? Was that chicken? I forgot, to be honest.

Holy crap, I was able to finish most of the tasks! Only two were left (the arrangement of the musical scores for the first graders as well as the formation of the overall production sheet to be used for the elementary department.)

I have learned already earlier in my teaching journey that I’m not supposed to push my luck too much and that I should give a good margin for errors that can happen.

If there’s anything that teaching has imparted to me, I guess that it increased my patience by 200% over the past three years.

I was able to finish most of my stuff and that mattered.

At least, I get some time to goof around with my fellow male teachers after 3:30 pm!

I don’t know about the things that will happen later on, when the eye of night comes.

But I guess I’m contented that I’ve accomplished a couple of things and…here comes the three-day holiday!

For those celebrating the Chinese New Year, Gong Xi Fa Cai!

PS: Give me tikoy (rice cake) or ampaw (the lucky red envelope) please; I badly need the luck that comes with it. Thanks in advance!