day by day

Things are getting weird around here, between all the freshly minted acronyms (for example: IBFs/IGFs/IONs: Institute Boyfriends/Girlfriends/One Night Stands; SFGs: Significant Fucking Gains; etc.), episodes of Cafeteria Tummy, and 2am Kinko’s runs with people whose names you no longer bother to find out. I just walked out of the dining hall and ran into Mike, who was marching around wearing some type of WWII-style helmet for no apparent reason. I did not even blink.

I ended up getting just under 4 hours of sleep last night and I’m hoping for 5 tonight, but time will tell.

We wrote our first exam tonight. I don’t get to proctor it, though. Instead I get to teach a lesson on brainstorming, outlining, and drafting an essay - immediately after they are done taking that exam, and at the very end of the school day, no less. I expect it will be a real treat.

My bed is covered in stacks of papers. Some of them are mine, some not. Some are graded, others not. Some I have never seen before in my life.

I wish that I had lots of insightful things to say at this point, but really all I’m doing is going day by day, making sure my lessons work, trying to connect with my students, and doing my damndest to sleep, eat, and shower, in descending order of priority. I haven’t really had a bad day in the classroom yet. There have been lots of what I call “Learning Days,” days in which I walk out of the room knowing that if I had it all to do over again, not more than two words in a row would remain the same. This is not the same as a bad day. Bad days are when five students in the back of the class are sleeping face-down on their desks, and someone is making birdcalls in the back of the class, and one girl is giving you sass and two boys are hitting each other and that’s when your regional director walks in with the review sheet. Bad days are when teachers go into the hallway between periods and cry, and over dinner they talk about going home.