It's never over

Stopping to smell the peonies. Wait, that's a peony, right?

I've been working on the PACT (aka TPAs) off and on for the past three weeks, wrapping it up, spell checking and grammar checking, and making sure I'm adding enough details to give me a good enough score to pass. And then I recall that not every PACT submitted will be graded by the All-Knowing-All-Powerful-Panel-Whom-Provides-Teaching-Credentials-Upon-Those-They-Are-Well-Pleased-With. If I do happen to be chosen as one of the lucky few to go before the panel, I'll pass with a 2. Out of 4. And apparently a 4 is nearly impossible to achieve, even for my professors and other seasoned teachers.

What kind of joke is that?

I swear, I've spent AT LEAST 20 hours working on this thing, NOT including attending the class that tells us how to do it. NOT including all the prep and background work that has to be in place for the context for learning. Just the writing, uploading, and form-filling out part. It's insane work that is driving me crazy.

So it's probably no surprise that I want to be done with this already. That I've slowly developed a Threat Level Red headache as today progressed, putting the final touches onto this project. That I feel like throwing my computer out the window because Taskstream isn't willing to upload my last few files during the internet's high usage hours.

So I'm going to be calm, and leave it alone, and come back to it later tonight. Because this is not worth the disintegration of my mental state to struggle with it when it's not being cooperative. Contrary to myths about teachers, we do have better things to do than accumulate stress levels that can kill an elephant.