Thursday, November 20, 2008

I'm in the doldrums.

Teaching the entire year is similar to playing the entire baseball season. It's long and tiring. I'm in one of the low patches in the year. I'll get out of it but it's just paperwork, paperwork, and more stupid paperwork combined with unruly kids, unavailable parents, incredulous administrators, and stupid sh*t that keeps me from doing what I was hired to do - teach.

This week at school we're doing all sorts of spirit stuff for school spirit week. It's like color wars at summer camp. We should be preparing for benchmark testing but instead we're wasting miles of colored paper to make hall decorations and floats. It should be fun and it isn't and I'll tell you why. Almost all of the time the kids wear uniforms and there's no fun, not even candy, allowed in the school. It's depressing. The kids are miserable. It's like jail without the drugs. Anyway, this spirit week comes and now we can wear different clothes, we don't do much schoolwork, we do art stuff, and the kids go f*$%ing bananas because they don't know what to do with themselves. Fun is sort of a foreign concept to them. They don't have fun like everyone else. I'm not trying to condescend, they don't know what it is. Fun isn't laughter and good times. Fun for a lot of the students is calling each other ugly, poking each other with scissors, and stomping on the floor like it's a step dance competition. Needless to say, the fun I'm having is mostly reigning in the kids and trying to keep people from getting into fistfights. This spirit week crap is going to be the death of me. I hope we never do this again. I know, I sound like an old bitter grandma but damn it, this stuff is tougher than teaching. I'm running out of energy.

Thanksgiving can't come soon enough. There's only about 20 teaching days left for the year. Not than I'm counting or anything. I've got to recharge. I've got to recharge.

1 comment:

Darx said...

Hang in there, my friend! Soon there will be turkey on your plate and a beer in your hand. I wonder if there's a way to make spirit week last in a small way so that it's not so foreign a concept?