What I Like About Teaching

It's 9:00pm on a Sunday, and it's about this time every week when I begin to dread the coming school week. As much fun as it is to sit and stew in my despair over my job teaching, I figured it wasn't a very productive or mentally healthy exercise. Besides, I only have 60 hours left of my vacation and I'll be damned if I'm spending them moping about going back to school. So without further ado, a list of things I actually enjoy about teaching:

1. The vacation time. It's frequent, and it's lengthy. Also, I get 10 sick days.
2. Being the smartest person in the room. It's hard not to be the smartest person in the room when you are surrounded by small children, but still it's a nice feeling. Me and the Pope have an infallibility thing going on.
   
3. The pity/admiration you receive from others. I've never had a job that is so positively received. Most people say kind things about my choice of profession, though mostly people say things like "Wow, that sounds hard."
4. Being able to completely understand everything that my favorite student says, event hough he speaks in broken English AND has a speech delay. Seriously, it's an accomplishment.
5. The off-the-charts cuteness factor. I still prefer puppies to human young, but my students are pretty cute.
   
6. My students are so gullible that I generally only have to talk in an excited tone to get them to be excited too.
   
7. My approval really means something to my students. Disappointing me is an awful feeling, or so I gather.
   
8. My students are so little that just about any activity is educational. Seriously -- even doing crafts with cutting is a useful activity as it helps students build their fine motor skills.
   
9. My students are excited to learn. When I say, "You are wasting your own learning time" they get upset.
   
10. My students are genuinely good kids. One of my kids choked a student, and 3 other students jumped into the fray to stop the fight. All of my students are eager to help each other -- almost to a fault.
    

No Britney

I am so busy right now I barely have time to attend to my basic needs. However, after watching Britney Spears perform at the VMA awards (yes I'm watching the VMA, and no I am NOT in middle school) I had to come online to say that she is a complete mess. I may have had a mediocre week teaching and I'm not fully prepared for the week ahead, but at least I am not Britney Spears.

Back From the Internet Dead Care of Some Testicles

I have been pretty incommunicado with the blog (and the world) the in the weeks since institute finished because I've been trying to rebuild my self-confidence and work on my sleep deficit. Also, I didn't really have a reliable computer while I was home, or an internet connection since I moved to NYC. Then I found an unprotected wireless network named "Eatmyballs." So this, and all of my posts until Time Warner comes to give me internet access will be brought to you courtesy of "Eatmyballs."

Having the internet has really brightened my life recently because until Sunday I had only an am/fm radio in the way of electronic entertainment. This, combined with the fact that all I've been doing recently is cleaning and cooking, was making me feel like some sort of 1930s era housefrau (assuming of course that a 1930s era housefrau listened to Hot 97.1 all the time). Thanks "Eatmyballs" -- you've made my life brighter by allowing me to control how many times I have to hear the song "My Girl Got a Girlfriend."

In desperate need of a brightside

I have slept for, maybe, a total of 8-9 hours since Sunday. And it's not looking as if I'm going to add much to that total for the rest of the week.

Today on the way to school, I sat in a steamy and uncomfortable bus as our bus driver tried his best to navigate the bus through literally 6 inches+ of running water thanks to a torrential downpour. There was zero visibility and the bus driver had to keep getting up from his seat to wipe the fog off the windshield so he could see. Nothing like the intense fear that you may die to wake you up in the morning.

For the bazillionth time in a row, it feels as if I'm having to plan a new lesson that has nothing to do with the lesson I had originally planned.

On top of this, today I found out that my class has 6 students who either need to pass the reading or the math state exam to become 6th graders. This means that everything I teach needs to help them or they're repeating the fifth grade in the fall. No pressure!!

On the brightside, yesterday I signed a lease for a 2 bedroom apt on the Upper East Side, literally steps away from Kylie. Woohoo! I have a place to live that is far, far away from Craptown U.

True Excitement

In what I'm certain will be the first of many repetitive brightsides, this week I'm thankful for sleeping in. Tomorrow is July 4th, which means no school. This means I get to sleep in -- till 6:45 am! On top of that, I get the afternoon off. Party (without guests or alcohol)!!! Despite my seeming overuse of exclamation marks, I assure you that I am 100% serious about this.

I Hope That Saying About First Being Worst Isn't True...

I'm currently living on a college campus in New York to begin the training necessary for my new teaching career. I've been reliving the first few days of the Freshman year of college: meeting dozens of people whose names I forget almost instantly and forgetting what everyone looks like once they change clothes. I've probably asked "Where are you from?" and "What will you be teaching?" 1,000 times in the last 3 days. All these "polite" (read largely uninteresting) conversations are sucking the soul out of me. I haven't had to make friends in a long time, and I forgot how labor intenstive it is. I am so tired all the time, and I haven't even begun the hard part (teaching) yet.

On the brightside, I finally have a little bit of certainty. Though I've known for months where I will be teaching in the fall, I only found out today what I will be teaching: I am going to be a first grade teacher (!). I'm particularly excited about being a first grade teacher because it guarantees me immortality. About 20 years from now, my last name will probably serve as the answer to an online banking security question for one of my students. More importantly, I will live on in perpetuity in class photos, so that even when I'm old and bitter, my young and bitter self will exist in the memories of my students. Right now, at this late hour, this teaching assignment makes me happy because I can finally be able to tell all these other future teachers what grade I'm going to teach and manage to stretch these polite convos 10 seconds longer.

On the brightside...

In the coming weeks and months, I will probably be going crazy trying to live in a new city and trying to teach. I imagine I will be going crazy at times, and that it will probably be worthwhile to reflect on some of the better things that are going on in my life. Let me start that positivism today.

At first I thought that smug dude from Dodgeball in the Apple ads was annoying. However, I just bought a new MacBook, so now I know that Macs are awesome. Macs are so much more fun than PCs -- it was extremely easy to set up and it came with a lot of cool applications. Plus, I got a free Ipod when I bought my MacBook because I'm (going to be) a teacher. Thanks MacBook for making the past few days so fun, even if means I've spent a lot of time alone playing with Big Bang Board Games and ComicLife, it was still time well spent. Check out this comic I made about the Going Away Party I had this past weekend: