I've spent this week at school, playing tetris with the furniture trying to fit in the extra desks somehow, with rivulets of sweat pouring down body parts I didn't even know could sweat, as the radio reminds us all juuuust a tiny bit redundantly about the record-breaking heat wave.
Truthfully, it's kind of fun. I mean, not the part where you're wrestling with the backing paper and the stupid borders and end up totally tangled and balancing on three toes and an elbow to try to staple something a foot and a half above your head. And not the part where you develop carpel tunnel cutting out, like 8,000 of the same shape something-or-others. And also not the part where "organizing" your library equals the room regurgitating rando books all over itself until you give up and throw it all back in the closet anyway...
So yeah, some of it sucks. But in other ways it's kind of a great week because it's the one time all year I know I'm ahead of the game. My classroom is the most organized and in tact that it will be all year, before the kids come and (heavens!) start using everything and and putting things back in the wrong places and breaking things and bending them and indulging their graffiti-artist impulses. You can focus just on the "stuff" of teaching, which there's a lot of, without worrying about the hows and whens and wheres and whys. And everyone is all excited to see each other again and you can take long lunches whenever it is that you get hungry. Plus, I'm not gonna lie, I totally love having a reason to spend money at fun places like Dollar Deal$ and Michael's... (although I still maintain that the bigwigs in charge have no idea how much of their precious public school system is based on the charitable spending of their employees.)
And all the fussing with the room gives you lots of time to acclimate yourself to the thought of being in there all day again, and to try to arrange things to make it more bearable.
The new Corky is great - She doesn't have a nickname yet, but she's the best possible second best. She's taught in Ecuador for five years and in the Bronx for one, and is young and energetic and uses the Smartboard. Couldn't have come up with a better replacement if I'd ordered one off the internet...
The playground renovation looks good, all they have to do is take the chain link fences off and (fingers crossed!) tell us we're allowed to use it...
I wonder if N-- has any idea how often I still think of him. Can't think too hard or it makes me a little queazy, but I wonder if he remembers standing in the doorway after some lunchtime incident, and I wonder if he remembers me imploring, "You're a good person! So why are you acting this way?" And I wonder if that will be his take-home message from me. That he's a good person. I hope it is. It could easily be the opposite...Fifth grade. Hovers just before the doorway to the Dark Side. Decisions are made that might impact a lifetime. Or not. No way to know.
I wonder if maybe this year it could be "just a job." Like maybe I will think about other stuff as much as I think about teaching. Like maybe it won't consume me, maybe I will walk out the door at 2:37 and be able to leave it behind. Maybe it won't be draining, maybe just... stasis? Part of me wants that. Part of me doesn't.
And as I write this, Pandora radio has been sort of eerily voicing my general thought patterns. La Roux started it with "Maybe this time I'll be Bulletproof," repeated over and over again like a mantra, and Kate Nash, too -- 'This time, it will be different."
Better. It will be better. Than ever before.
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