The kids are coming on Monday...

The kids are coming on Monday...

No, that's probably not right. I would feel prepared if they were coming that soon. There is no way school starts on Monday. Maybe I should check my email again (like I don't reload the page enough as it is) and see if someone messed up in telling me that.

The kids are coming on Monday?!?

What?! I just checked and apparently they actually are. Monday definitely marks the beginning of the 2012-2013 school year and there's not really anything I can do about. This is happening, regardless of my preparedness.

But I guess it doesn't really matter if they come next Monday or the Monday after that or the Monday after that. I'm still not going to feel prepared, and I think that's the nature of teaching. I can plan as many lessons as I can come up with, arrange (and rearrange...and rearrange again) the desks until my body physically cannot move desks anymore, and tape/tack/staple/pin as many posters and informational documents around my classroom until there is no wall space left and I have to start using the backs of chairs and the students themselves (wait, what?) but I am never going to feel truly prepared. I have no idea what my 70+ first semester students like (ideally learning), dislike (hopefully not me), and have in store for their English teacher (apples and neon post-it notes, please). Everything I think we will be doing over the next 4 months could change drastically the moment my first student walks in the door. That is both terrifying and exciting, because these workdays and last summer days spent getting ready could have been for naught, but maybe I'll be afforded the opportunity to do something more innovative and worthwhile for my kids. Or it will all blow up in my face and I'll go home crying after the first day! You never know...

The kids are coming on Monday!!!

I'm honestly really looking forward to the start of this year! I feel great about the place I'm at, the people I'm surrounded by, and the direction I hope my teaching will take. I'm starting a new position this year (new school, new classes) and so far I have been impressed, inspired, and somewhat intimidated. I'm out of my comfort zone with this yearbook class, for sure, and that's a huge contributing factor, but it's also the fact that I've heard about and already seen so many great things happening at my school that I feel the bar has been raised. This is good for me because I feel challenged in a way I hadn't been before, but didn't truly realize I needed that in the same way I now am sure I do. For those of you who know me, you would find it telling that I have already found myself stressing out a bit over the upcoming school year. So I'm having to give myself the advice I usually give others: that I can't do much more in two days (okay, so I may go in over the weekend), that I will realize I'm more prepared than I feel, and that though I won't be able to do anything about which kids I get, I can control everything they get from me within my classroom. No worries- bring on the teen angst!

Happy New School Year, teachers!

And Happy Payday!!! (If only 'N Sync had made an official music video...)

Billy Madison said it best:

This One Time, at Yearbook Camp...

I'm on day two of yearbook camp. Yes, yearbook camp exists. Yes, it spans multiple days.  Yes, it is equal parts beneficial and panic attack inducing.

Pro
They put us up in a really nice hotel with amazing rooms, food, and facilities.
Con
I have eaten more in the past 14 hours than the previous 3 days combined.

Pro
I get to work with some of the yearbook students before the school year starts.
Con
I am spending some of the last few days of summer with students.

Pro
I have a better idea of what I'm getting into.
Con
I have a better idea of what I'm getting into.

I love that I'm getting the opportunity to see what I'm in for ahead of time because it is definitely going to make me more prepared and give me a jump-start on learning some of the tricks of the trade. HOWEVER, I am also realizing how much this is going to test my ability (or lack there of) to stay on top of things, get work done ahead of time, and micromanage several different areas at once.

I'm freaking out, but only a little bit!

The problem with blogging...

I have some issues with blogging about my teaching experiences. They're not technical problems like "What is blogging?" (I've never known a world without the internet) or "How am I ever supposed to decide between Helvetica and Georgia?" (I struggled with this for a bit, but there's just something about those serifs that is really off-putting).

1. I don't want to 'lessen' my experiences.

Something I'm often scared of doing is losing some valuable aspect of an experience I have had by describing it to someone else. It's as if I'm worried an inexplicable part, the 'it factor,' that je ne sais quoi (if I spoke French, which I don't, so never mind) will be diminished. There are moments that every teacher has where you think, "Ah...this is it. This is why I teach. It's all worth it." Of course, this is probably immediately followed by the worst moment of your teaching career (or at least the day) and you promptly retract anything positive you'd just thought.

But seriously, as cliché as it sounds, those are the experiences that get you through, that you grab hold of and return to when you are huddled on the table in the corner of your classroom out of sight of the door with the lights turned off during your planning period hoping that the janitor doesn't come in to clean your floors for another 10 minutes because you need a chance to remember why you chose to be a teacher, why you shouldn't just go home, and how you're going to quit being the dramatic, overly sensitive, naive first-year teacher you hear about during teacher training and become the teacher in those inspirational films about education portrayed by Hilary Swank or Edward James Olmos or Michelle Pfeiffer (and hopefully not Cameron Diaz or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ben Stein).

I think those moments are so powerful in a teacher's mind and so personal that describing them to someone else might weaken them in some way. I know that I don't have that same way with words so many authors do that I admire, and I worry that I'm not able to describe things the way I replay them in my mind. They are so vivid there. It's like that moment when you wake up from a dream and everything is still so clear and it all makes sense, but then you try to explain what was happening to someone else and it is suddenly impossible to get across just how incredible/horrifying/bizarre your dream was. That is an unbelievably frustrating feeling, but what's worse is the harder you try to describe it, the fuzzier the image becomes in your mind, and after a little while, you can't even remember what your dream was about. I don't want to forget what those moments were like simply because I can't adequately express myself. (Not to mention how frustrating it is to be on the receiving end of that dream story...)

2. I'm not sure people actually care.

I don't mean this in a whiny, self-deprecating way- I'm perfectly okay with no one ever reading this. What I do mean is that in general, relating these experiences is difficult because of the wide range of people I could interact with. I'm a teacher. I go to school five days out of the week, I plan, grade, or think about teaching every night, and, for better or worse, it's what I end up talking about a lot of the time. This gets old for non-teachers. Hey, it gets old for teachers too, I just can't seem to stop! (To be fair, teaching gives you a lot of material for entertaining stories, so at least there's that.)

I have found that sharing those truly memorable experiences with a friend who is a coworker is ideal, a friend who is a teacher somewhere else is a close second, followed by other educators in general (that teacher intuition, I guess), and then non-teacher friends (supportive/interested, but a true understanding? It's hard to say.). Does that mean my relationships with my non-teacher friends are going to weaken over time because I won't want the most important parts of my career to feel 'less than' in some way? Or because I won't even try sharing those stories as that would run the risk of having them be underappreciated? I don't think so. I hope not. But I still wonder.

3. I'm not Erin Gruwell or Jaime Escalante or any of those other SuperTeachers.

I'm not teaching the 'unteachables' or working in unimaginable conditions. Some of my students have experienced things I will fortunately never have to go through and that has to be worked with. There have been challenging situations in my classroom that I have had to handle. These make for great teaching/learning moments and some interesting stories, but Stand and Deliver this is not. Ideally, I get to look back at this and remember an event I normally might not have or realize something about my teaching I wouldn't have before. Metacognition, right? Educational buzzword!

Chalk's depiction of teaching in a public school:

And those who can't...

From what I've heard, those who can, do, and those who can't, teach. Well, I imagine whoever's saying that has never tried to teach high school seniors why they should care about the conceits in John Donne's metaphysical poetry when graduation is only a few months away. That person has probably never tried to explain to kids why they need to read "Speech in the Virginia Convention" in English class when, "um, we just learned about that in History." And I would bet that someone who puts any faith in that saying has never attempted to educate, discipline, and inspire 30+ teenagers in the last 90 minutes of their 7 hour day.

Teaching is challenging, exciting, frustrating, entertaining, confusing, exhausting, inspiring, and no day is ever the same. I love it for all of these reasons and hope to touch on why with the occasional post on here. For now, check out Taylor Mali's performance about teaching:

"What Teachers Make"