Choose or lose

So here's my big dilemma:

Every single morning (but especially on Mondays) I drag myself mournfully out of bed, and while I'm dejectedly brushing my teeth and deciding whether I'm going to wear my uncomfortable but badass professional shoes or my scruffy but blissfully pain-free flats, I think: I can't do this next year, I don't want to do this next year, I need to have a different job next year, I hope I'm not a teacher next year.

And then most afternoons, as I'm heading away from school toward the gym and Duane Reade (I swear I spend the bulk of my non-teaching time in a Duane Reade), a teeny tiny Vivian Paley-esque spark glimmers within me and I think: Well...maybe. Maybe.

I know that it's perfectly natural to feel dread at the beginning of the school day and relief at the end, but which will be the stronger pull for me? Should I heed the advice in this Monster.com commercial (with which I strongly identify, by the way), or should I take heart in the message of this Teach NYC ad (with which I take exception; obviously New York's other influential role models wear Mets uniforms, not Yankee uniforms).

In other news, tomorrow is Day 1 of the dreaded ELA exam, and hmm, what's that I smell cooking in the air? Could that possibly be the smell of...doom?! I'll be proctoring, so it looks like I get to find out!

Disturbing behavior

I've had a lot of bad days since I started teaching. Sometimes it's a bad day because the kids won't stop talking and fidgeting and interrupting and needling and I want to rip my hair out. Sometimes it's a bad day because they respond with blank stares and obvious confusion and I feel as though I haven't done my job as an educator. Sometimes it's a bad day because I'm just plain tired of denying them permission over and over again to go to the bathroom, get a drink of water and use crayons.

I've had bad days where I go home crying and bad days where I slink back to my office and pound the desk in frustration. But I've never had a bad day like Friday.

It started off with a really creepy dream in which I was helping my ESL first graders practice learning their colors when all of a sudden one of them looked straight at me and said, "We were glad when September 11 happened. When the planes flew into the buildings, we thought it was a good thing and we were celebrating."

Okay, what? First of all, she wasn't even born yet. Second of all, she doesn't speak English well enough to say all that to me. Third of all...there is no third of all, except to wonder why in the world my brain would even go there. Anyway, just as that happened, my alarm went off, and I was left with an eerie feeling to start off the day.

You may remember that Darryl is one of my favorite kids in kindergarten. On Friday, I found out from his teacher that Darryl's mother has taken out a restraining order on Darryl's father, who apparently tried to kill her. In front of Darryl.

Darryl has not yet received the mandatory counseling he's supposed to have been getting since the beginning of the school year. Darryl also hasn't been to school in two days.

And then, in one of my classes, I told Nathaniel I would have to send a letter home to his parents about his misbehavior, and he promptly burst into tears.

"I don't want to get a letter home!" he wailed. As you might imagine, this happens all the time, and so I wasn't exactly moved. But then he said something that struck me cold. The last time a letter got sent home, he said, his dad had choked him so hard that he couldn't breathe.

"He almost killed me," he said between terrified sobs. "I don't want to die! I don't want to die!"

There are few horrors in life that are quite like hearing a six-year-old cry at you that he doesn't want to die.

Nathaniel is a kid who doesn't always tell the truth, and he's a kid who acts out a lot in class and is prone to histrionics about it. But his regular teacher was absent, and so in the absence of more concrete information, I had to call the mandated reporter hotline and file a report.

Sometimes, this job will break your heart.

The verb pipe

Jacob: "You know how I said you look just like my friend's girlfriend? Well, you sound just like her, too."
Miss Brave: :::crickets:::

* * *

I had a gut feeling that I would be Observed again today. As it turns out, I wasn't, but I wish I had been. I feel like the kids are much mellower after their vacation -- before break they were so obviously sick of each other, sniping and tattling and nagging all the time, and it was pretty disgusting -- and my snazzy lesson on verbs went really well. (It didn't hurt that Mark the hairdresser -- see Item #7 in the link -- was absent, either.)

First I read the kids a boring little story (with accompanying photos courtesy of Google Image Search) I wrote up about my vacation: "One chilly evening, I went to the Bronx Zoo. There were monkeys in the trees. I saw sea lions in the water. In the garden, there were butterflies." Then I jazzed it up by adding some kickin' verbs: "Monkeys climbed and jumped in the trees. I saw sea lions splashing in the water. Butterflies fluttered in the garden."

Then we did the same to caption some photos of our old friend Flat Stanley, and then I asked for "volunteers who are not shy" to play a game in front of the class; I sneakily showed my volunteers a card with a verb on it that they had to perform for the class, and then we wrote sentences about what they were doing and figured out which word was the verb. Aside from the usual tears from a few of my first graders who didn't get a turn, it went off without a hitch. And just now in the shower (where some of my best thinking occurs) I came up with an idea to present the ever-dreaded notion of verb tenses: a matching game like Concentration where the kids will have to match the present tense verb with its past tense form (i.e., "see" and "saw," "go" and "went").

If only I could get over my fear of singing in front of my students, I would teach them the verb song I made up to the tune of "Jingle Bells":

What's a verb? An action word!
It tells you what to do
I can write by using verbs
And you can do it, too!

Yup, move over, Rodgers & Hammerstein. It's better at least than my noun song, which never saw the light of day thanks to the wonders of the Noun Eater:

Nouns, nouns, looking all around
A noun is a person, place or thing
Nouns, nouns, looking all around
Nouns make writing interesting!

In other news, today a first grader asked me how to spell "TV."

You know, I could really get used to this whole "Wednesday through Friday" work week thing.

Well, ask a stupid question...

Miss Brave: "Keith, why were you in the bathroom for so long?"
Keith: "I was going poo poo."

We'll drink a cup of kindness yet

It's the night before the first day of school in 2008, and I'm irrationally worried that it's going to feel like the first day of school all over again.

Maybe if I hadn't had the best winter vacation in the whole world, it wouldn't be so hard to go back. But as it is, teaching feels like a dream: Did I really do that last year?

I left before the break feeling unexpectedly fond of my job, and now I find myself (not so unexpectedly) dreading my return.

I don't know if it's my position, my school, my colleagues or the profession altogether...but next year, something's going to have to change.

There's a hand, my trusty friend

When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"

"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle playing softly and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, "This is now."

She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

My new year's resolutions as an educator are these:

1) to respect my students' tender minds, their easily wounded hearts, their efforts and their challenges;

2) to challenge myself to think beyond, to get creative, to stoke the fires that will burn tiny fires under the butts of each and every one of my 400+ students;

3) to reflect constructively on my teaching successes and failures and accept them gracefully as learning experiences;

4) to breathe deeply, speak smoothly, and enjoy the ride.

Happy 2008, everyone!

So nobody's going to call me "Miss Brave" for a whole week?

I MADE IT TO WINTER BREAK.

(And I've been waiting four long months to say that!)

I don't know if it's just the joy of the holidays, or if the fact that I got to sit in on a reading professional development session that opened my mind up to new possibilities (oh, how I miss teaching reading!), but for the first time so far this year I had a new, irrational thought that was terrifying and exciting all at the same time:

Maybe I'm not done here yet.