Well friends, as it turns out, people weren't lyin' when they said that you just try to survive your first year of teaching... dadgum this junk is tough! I probably should warn that this post is probably going to be a whine-fest...and i apologize profusely (although obviously not enough to stop the whining).
So, maybe I think I hate teaching this week. Maybe I am again seriously contemplating the possibilities of going without sleep so that I could study for the GRE and get into a grad school which would rescue me from this profession next year.
Realistically speaking, I think it is a combination of exhaustion and slowly creeping sickness that is saying "I HATE THIS"...rather than the more upbeat me of late. But I have wondered every day so far if I really have to go to school...and the answer is always Yes. Blast.
Ok, so a sudden drop in sleep from 10 or so hours a night to 5 or less is not so good for the ol' optimism. Sniffles and a dull headache don't help either. The fact that I still don't like middle schoolers at all is a little dimming for the hope. Why are they so dadgum mean to each other? Why do they NEVER EVER shutup? Why am I not fast enough to catch them in their crappiness to actually enforce the discipline plan in such a way as to make them desire to stop being crap-heads? Ay, my words are not very g-rated tonight...I guess wanting to punch heads but feeling totally impotent to do so is catching up with me.
On the plus side, my 7th period (the horridly awful period) is getting better, minutely little by minutely little step. They somehow manage to make me laugh as well as make me shake with frustration pretty much every day, so at least I haven't stopped laughing. Although, stopping laughing would probably be more helpful to my cause in this crash course in learning just how much I don't know about classroom management. Another plus side moment came today in Earth Science (which is a combo of 9th - 11th grade kids who really, really, REALLY don't want to be in a science class) when most of the class understood my explanation of how to convert between metric measurements. This is a HUGE relief as we've been working at this for 3 days now...total and complete confusion Mon. and Tues., but today, ahhhhh yes, understanding is starting to glimmer forth. Hallelujah! Also, due to 3 days of practice in explaining this stuff (besides their unwillingness to learn, I think I explained badly), I finally have a way to explain that made sense to the 8th graders today. Hallelujah again! We shall see if they really get it tomorrow when I give them somewhere near 8000 problems to work (ha, ok, maybe it's more like 20). And one last plus, one of my health classes only has 6 girls in it...and they are so cooperative and polite and fun and they understand things so fast. Ahh, I love second period!
And now, I'm going to go home and go to bed, and tomorrow I'm going to get up and I'm going to go to school, and it's going to be ok. Who knows, miracles could happen, I could be a good classroom manager tomorrow (or maybe just soon) and maybe my kids will do what they're supposed to. And maybe I'll still learn to love them yet...because I need to.
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