The Pros & Cons

Oddly enough, having an open-ended blog topic is harder to write than I thought it would be. I actually almost forgot that this blog was due. I’ve been in a weird place emotionally lately. I haven’t been finishing planning the night before; instead, I’ll pass out around 10:30 p.m. unable to stay awake any longer and whenever I wake up again, be it 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning, I pick up where I left off. I usually finish before I have to leave for work. Sometimes, I’ll have to finish my creative writing slideshow during my planning period. Nine weeks into teaching and I’m feeling burnt out. No, scratch that, I am definitely burnt out, not just feeling it.

Teaching is so time-consuming. I don’t just get to come home after work and do non-work-related things. I have to come home, plan, grade, work on grad work, and somehow still try to make time for me. I don’t have the greatest focus, I’ll admit. Some weeks, I have it more together than others. Sometimes, I actually go home and plan like I desperately need to or grade my growing pile of assignments. But lately, I’ve been overcorrecting, to borrow a term from How I Met Your Mother. For all the time I spend working or worrying about work throughout the day, the moment I get home, I can’t seem to motivate (or force) myself to work on teaching stuff anymore. Instead of taking an hour break, I’ll check out for most of the evening. It’s not a system that will work for the long term, I know.

The longer I teach, the more I’m reminded of why I hated high school. I can’t figure out why kids need to be in school for seven, eight hours straight for five days a week. I’m not sure how that system benefits students or the people teaching them. School starts to feel like an endurance run after a while. I got way too comfortable with taking mental health days in undergrad and I struggle to not waste my small number of personal/sick days. I will get out of bed thirty minutes late because that’s how long it takes me to convince myself that I’m more useful to my students at school then at home, that it’s better to be at school than to waste a day at home. And the weird thing is, when I get to school I feel so silly for struggling that much to get myself there.

I guess I’m experiencing a kind of cognitive dissonance between teacher-me and non-teacher-me. I’ll have these moments when I’m teaching where I’m suddenly very aware of what I’m doing. And as I am teaching in these moments, I’m also thinking to myself “I’m teaching right now. That’s a thing I’m doing. Words are coming out of my mouth. I’m actually teaching kids stuff. What???” I’m not a natural leader or particularly great at interacting with people I don’t know that well (seriously, I could tell as student was really upset last Wednesday and Thursday, but I don't like dealing with anything potentially emotional and so I let it go unaddressed), but teacher-me is somehow able to take charge in the classroom (for the most part) and actually act like an authority figure. Yet, there are still boxes in my apartment that I haven’t unpacked from my move to Olive Branch, I subsist off sandwiches because I'm too lazy to actually cook anything more complicated than mac & cheese, and I still haven’t put away my suitcase from the last time we had a class weekend. For my students, I probably look more put together than I actually am. It’s surreal, really.

I am struggling, but it’s not all bad. With this blog, I was able to vent a little bit, so I want to end on a positive note. Teaching has made me braver, if nothing else. (I actually step on bugs now because if I can teach twenty kids at a time, I can handle an encroaching insect. Dumb as that may sound…) As much as I focus on the negative – it’s a personality flaw, really – the job can be rewarding too.

5 Good Things about My Week:

1.     I’m starting to build up a rapport with some of my students, a kind of relationship where I feel like they do more than just tolerate me. I’m finally starting to feel like some of my students actually appreciate my presence a little bit.

2.     My students are disappointed when I don’t have a “Pun of the Day” or I forget to share it. It’s even better when they laugh at the pun.

3.     This was my best week for classroom management in my fifth and seventh periods. If my students think I’m mean for giving consequences for talking, then so be it. I mean, I have classroom rules for a reason.

4.     I may not have been on top of my planning this week, but I never got truly behind either. I was always prepared for class, even if just in the nick of time. Hopefully, when I have a more regular weekly schedule, planning will become easier and more efficient.

5.     I survived the first nine weeks! With the end of the first term, we also get a long weekend. I’m looking forward to having Monday off. Three days of sleeping in!