Week 7 Has Arrived

It has been awhile since I last posted. SO much has happened in the last six weeks. I haven't really known where to begin or how to process my thoughts, hence my blogging absence.

While I can't begin to sum up what my first six weeks as a teacher have been like, I suppose I've got to start somewhere, now, or I never will.

I've been exhausted, exhilarated, depressed, inspired, hopeful, and despairing just about every day since I began running a classroom. I've got 110 students spread across 7 sections of Algebra II, Geometry, and Literacy Remediation. I wake up at 5:45 am, get home from school at 5 if I'm lucky, eat, plan until 8 or 9, and go to bed. On the weekends, I plan all day Saturday and Sunday, while fitting in a few runs, church, and a movie or football game with my roommates. I've never worked so hard in my life. But I do feel that this is where I am supposed to be. As difficult as each day is, I savor the moments when I'm in front of my students, showing them how to do this-or-that, and they get it. Simple? Obvious? Yes, of course. But no less real or meaningful.

Overall, I am doing just fine. Thanks SO much to all of those who have sent me letters, email, or left voicemails of love/concern. It has meant so much to me to feel your support as I trod through the hours upon hours of planning and dealing with the ever-volatile teenage psyche.

A few scenes from the past few weeks:

-I was teaching about the distance formula when one of my students raised his hand, holding up one of my hairs, and asked me politely if I have to wash my hair everyday.

-I went to make copies one afternoon during my planning period only to be startled to see one of my sweetest (however capricious) students handcuffed, escorted out of the school by two policemen.

-One of my most academically gifted and socially mature students left last week to have a child. She has been tutoring for two hours with me every Thursday evening at McDonald's for the past few weeks, even though she already knows how to most everything. What a courageous young woman. She has what it takes to go to any college she chooses, but with the baby on the way, she will need to stay close to home.

-In my literacy remediation section, an administrator happened to walk in (for the only time all year) to my students huddled around the powerpoint singing and grooving to the (unedited) words to "Boys in the Hood," as I scrambled for control of my lesson (on the impact of violent song lyrics). I turned red.

-One day that same block of remediation was so out of control that I it took me a half hour to notice one of the students writing gang symbols in black sharpie all over the desk.

-One of my students ran in to Algebra II shouting "I'm not late" (he obviously was) as his pants tumbled to his ankles. To sag or not to sag. Maybe he knows now.

-I ripped up a student's test in front of her face when she broke my no-talking rule on the first quiz. I turned around trembling and smiling: I shocked myself by actually doing it.

-This student's mother barged into my next class, as I was teaching, and began accosting me in front of my students. She returned several times that day, and eventually we worked through the debacle. But boy, was it a debacle.