The Joy of the Commute

I've got my morning schedule down to a perfectly tuned, minute-by-minute choreography of showering, doing hair and makeup, reading a little news, drinking juice, getting dressed, etc... While these things don't need to necessarily be in order, it always throws me off when something interrupts the routine.

This morning it didn't happen in the flat. It happened on the street. More specifically, at the Underground station that I use every single morning...

I was absolutely not prepared for the sight of iron gates and darkened insides of the station I usually rush into with a newspaper in hand, preparing to begin my 60 minute trip to school.

"Central Line is not running at any stations due to power failure." oh crap, I'm thinking.

There are a dozen different ways to travel through this city, so I immediately thought of rushing to the next nearest station, where I can take the Circle Line to King's Cross and catch the train I need to get to North London (where the school is).

Upon arriving at Bayswater Station, I saw the message "Circle Line is closed to due power problems". OH CRAP, I'm now shouting in my head.

This started an adventure that had me running into the school after 90 minutes of travel, where I learned that a supply teacher was going to be watching my class while I completed reading benchmarks (standardized reading exams for my students) and that she needed my plans.

The plans I was supposed to write when I got to school EARLY.

To make things more complicated, the regular teacher for the other year 2 class wasn't there today, and had a supply teacher who showed up a half hour late. So we had to juggle two classes while I tried to figure out plans for they day. Definitely made for an interesting start of my week...

I'm pretty proud of handling things as calmly as I did, while everybody else kinda panicked. One of us had to be cool, so I decided to be the good-in-a-crisis person. The day did end up going pretty smoothly, and the children had a good day in both classes, so we were happy.

You would think I'd learned from that experience to be hyper-prepared for tomorrow, with all of the things laid out and photocoping done. But I've got the worksheets sitting in the classroom, waiting to irritate myself or my TA while they run sloooowly through the photocopier tomorrow morning.

Which of course means that that entire Underground will stop running and I'll have to rent a horse to get to school.


Until tomorrow...