And my most immediate and pressing thought is, How in the name of labor laws can I survive 181 more days of this?!
With that said, I had a fantastic first two days. I feel like I have solid control over each of my six classes, although I've heard that students take these first few days to get a feel for new teachers before really testing them in the second week, so perhaps my next blog will tell a different, darker tale. But for the most part, I have a class's worth of eyes and ears trained on me, which can at times be invigorating and at other times be slightly unmoving, such as when I announce I had a bagel with peanut butter and honey on it for breakfast and wonder if they now think I'm a complete waste of their time, telling them what's on my morning menu.
Anyway, this job is more draining than a bathtub, more sapping than maple syrup, more exhausting than...sorry, I'll stop. In all seriousness, after the last class of the day my brain is screaming for a break, yet I can't give it one because I have to plan for tomorrow, even though deep in my soul I feel like my work must be done for the day. When I finally do leave the school, about ninety minutes after the last student does, my legs are noodles, which makes pedaling even the swiftest of Schwinns rather tough. And no, I didn't finish planning for the next day in those ninety minutes, but I accepted exhaustion and "mercifully" decided to wake up an hour early the next morning to get everything planned, printed, and copied.
For the teachers reading this, you're nodding your head as you go, I'm sure. For the non-teachers reading this, you're shaking your head, I'm almost sure. I admit I was once guilty of it–drastically underestimating the energy required and complexity of teaching. But I challenge all non-teachers to try this: Take the most precious thing that a person can create and put that thing with 25 other precious things. Combined, these things don't get along. There are conflicts that arise between them. You have to help solve them as you: take attendance, keep one eye on the clock, extinguish little whispers in the back of the room, give painstakingly explicit directions, monitor conversations during group work to ensure the things are on task and applying themselves, listen to shared thoughts and push them further, that eye on the clock, write legibly with an impossibly hard-to-write-with dry-erase marker, send a student out of the room and think about what you're going to say to him or her as you continue teaching the class for a minute or so to give that student in the hallway time to think about what he or she did, notice students that aren't writing and kindly urge them to pick up that pencil, eye on the clock, hand out homework, respond to the question why do we need homework in a way that students will understand and buy in to, save time at the end to discuss the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington...
There is still so much that I left out, but I hope the above gives the non-teachers a small window into the difficulty of the job. And if it doesn't, let me link you in the right direction.
Damn that guy is a great orator, which is a word I taught today just after an anecdote about random acts of kindness followed by a quick turn-and-talk in which students gave others compliments because they're easy to give and gratifying to receive.
I hadn't planned to have the students give each other compliments, just as I hadn't planned to have a quick mini-lesson on alliterations the previous day, when I shared one that I'd written years ago: weightless without wings. After explaining what I was feeling when I wrote those three words, I casually mentioned that it embodies why I love writing. In math, there's only one solution to each problem, but with writing, the number of ways to describe a feeling such as utter elation is countless. With that being said, a blank page holds infinite possibilities, and perhaps I'll find that the beginning of a school day does too. (Though don't get any wrong ideas, writing still takes the cake.)
With that said, I had a fantastic first two days. I feel like I have solid control over each of my six classes, although I've heard that students take these first few days to get a feel for new teachers before really testing them in the second week, so perhaps my next blog will tell a different, darker tale. But for the most part, I have a class's worth of eyes and ears trained on me, which can at times be invigorating and at other times be slightly unmoving, such as when I announce I had a bagel with peanut butter and honey on it for breakfast and wonder if they now think I'm a complete waste of their time, telling them what's on my morning menu.
Anyway, this job is more draining than a bathtub, more sapping than maple syrup, more exhausting than...sorry, I'll stop. In all seriousness, after the last class of the day my brain is screaming for a break, yet I can't give it one because I have to plan for tomorrow, even though deep in my soul I feel like my work must be done for the day. When I finally do leave the school, about ninety minutes after the last student does, my legs are noodles, which makes pedaling even the swiftest of Schwinns rather tough. And no, I didn't finish planning for the next day in those ninety minutes, but I accepted exhaustion and "mercifully" decided to wake up an hour early the next morning to get everything planned, printed, and copied.
For the teachers reading this, you're nodding your head as you go, I'm sure. For the non-teachers reading this, you're shaking your head, I'm almost sure. I admit I was once guilty of it–drastically underestimating the energy required and complexity of teaching. But I challenge all non-teachers to try this: Take the most precious thing that a person can create and put that thing with 25 other precious things. Combined, these things don't get along. There are conflicts that arise between them. You have to help solve them as you: take attendance, keep one eye on the clock, extinguish little whispers in the back of the room, give painstakingly explicit directions, monitor conversations during group work to ensure the things are on task and applying themselves, listen to shared thoughts and push them further, that eye on the clock, write legibly with an impossibly hard-to-write-with dry-erase marker, send a student out of the room and think about what you're going to say to him or her as you continue teaching the class for a minute or so to give that student in the hallway time to think about what he or she did, notice students that aren't writing and kindly urge them to pick up that pencil, eye on the clock, hand out homework, respond to the question why do we need homework in a way that students will understand and buy in to, save time at the end to discuss the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington...
There is still so much that I left out, but I hope the above gives the non-teachers a small window into the difficulty of the job. And if it doesn't, let me link you in the right direction.
Damn that guy is a great orator, which is a word I taught today just after an anecdote about random acts of kindness followed by a quick turn-and-talk in which students gave others compliments because they're easy to give and gratifying to receive.
I hadn't planned to have the students give each other compliments, just as I hadn't planned to have a quick mini-lesson on alliterations the previous day, when I shared one that I'd written years ago: weightless without wings. After explaining what I was feeling when I wrote those three words, I casually mentioned that it embodies why I love writing. In math, there's only one solution to each problem, but with writing, the number of ways to describe a feeling such as utter elation is countless. With that being said, a blank page holds infinite possibilities, and perhaps I'll find that the beginning of a school day does too. (Though don't get any wrong ideas, writing still takes the cake.)