It's 8:00pm. As soon as I finish typing this I fully intend to crawl into bed and read a novel completely unrelated to teaching. It's Monday and already I feel my sanity slipping away. How can I be SO behind ALL the time, when all I do is work? Large parts of it I feel like I bring on myself. I'm not the model of blinding efficiency we hear so much about. I haven't put anything in a plastic sheet protector in months...and you know how much I love those things.
I look around my school and wonder why I'm the only one running around like this. Other teachers are stressed, but not about their classes. No one else has rules, consequences, or rewards posted on their walls. No one seems to have a system for kids who have been absent. No one has student of the week. Why am I knocking myself out trying to make these things work...spending all the extra time on them...when apparently other people can make the world go round without them. What is the secret magic that happens when they close their doors?
For some of them the "magic" is apathy and chaos....and I don't want that. But in some of these rooms learning is taking place without the late night runs to walmart to buy 12 pairs of scissors and the midnight baking of brownies for B-1's reward. Every time I figure out how to make one process efficient, something new pops up.
My lesson today was horrible. It will be horrible tomorrow as well, because I'm not going to spend the hour necessary to make it better tonight. Wednesdays isn't looking much better. We have parent teacher conferences this week and I have 130 progress reports that can't be filled up until I finish grading all the things that haven't been graded. I have piles of stuff on my desk that need to be filed. I have lesson plans and overheads from the beginning of the school year that are somewhere in the bottom of a file cabinet. Each week I feel like I have to choose one thing....grading, lesson planning, organization, or sanity. I tend spend about a week on each one...and during that week, nothing else gets done. I also have Reggie Barnes coming next week to observe my brand new prep (today was my third day with them) out of some kind of wierd bad karma. We are learning about the different types of soil in Mississippi. If it's possible, I care less than the students.
So now I'm off to curl up in my warm bed...secure in the knowledge that tomorrow will be one day closer to my day off/parent teacher conference day and with the hope that the weekend will arrive sooner than the deadlines. I am smack dab in the middle of survival mode and I'm not sure I'll ever escape. We had a speaker today come and talk about lesson plans (during my planning period--which was so convenient) and all I could think the whole time she was there was, "How do I get your job?" Will there be a day when I actually feel competent at this?
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