January Writing Challenge #7: Write about a loss.

Yesterday, at the end of the day, I lost two things.  My patience and my temper.  It happened during "clean up time."  That's the time when about 3 kids and I clean up the room, while the others talk, floss dance, run around and pair up for inventive games that involve choking one another.  While the clean up music is on, and I'm cleaning the room, I'm yelling, "Thirdlander, you left all your art supplies on the floor over here"  and "Thirdlander, your iPad needs to be in the cart," and "Thirdlander, you were supposed to clear off your table first before you went over to the cubbies to talk about Minecraft."

Yesterday I lost it and made everyone sit down to watch me clean up the room.  I walked around ranting as I picked up whiteboards, pencils, stray papers, books, and markers.  With each item I picked up, I said stuff like, "Hey!  Here's a whiteboard!  I'll pick this up and put it in the whiteboard bin" and "Look here, two pencils on the floor, let me pick these up and put them in the pencil case sitting right here on this table."  I did this pretty loudly and longly.  It was a big fat drag for everyone.

We had a talk about "clean up" time after my rant was done and I had successfully cleaned up the entire room. We're going to put some new procedures into play today, but I don't have high hopes that things will change that much.  I want to be optimistic, but I guess I've lost that too.  Basically, I hate "clean up" time.