Okay, it’s only day seventeen, but maybe it’s time to stop knocking on wood: I am having an amazing time with this current group of kids, better than last year, which was a tremendously good year. I’m having literally zero discipline problems– one of the kids asked me the other day what my worst class was, and while I’d never tell a kid the answer (or at least give any answer other than “yours,”) the truth is I don’t have a worst class. Still. Surely, by now, one class should have emerged? Like, my first hour is my hardest, but that’s because I have a ton of special ed kids in that room and we don’t have enough staff in special education. I really should have a co-teacher in that group and I don’t. But it’s not behavioral difficulty, and it’s not even really disinterest difficulty– it’s that they’re really low and that’s hard to work with. That doesn’t make them a bad class, just a challenging one. I don’t mind a challenge.

I have never had a year of school where I didn’t have at least a small handful of kids that could make me happiest by not showing up to school. I don’t have a single kid who fits that description this year. My most ADHD kids are still nice. I had a couple of kids the first day who I had pegged as “I will either love you by the end of the year or you will be my worst enemy,” and they all straightened out already.

If this keeps up it’s going to be the best year of my career, and it’s not going to be close. There’s a hell of a lot of school left; there’s no doubt about that, and the end of September is always rough, and February-March is always rough; there are tougher times genuinely baked into the calendar that aren’t going to change. But I’m at the point where I feel like it would take some truly catastrophic transfers in to drag this crew down. I’m crossing my fingers.

I mean, hell, they took their first test of the year yesterday– do y’all remember the last time I used the phrase “first test of the year” around here and didn’t also use the words “shit the bed”? Because I don’t. I’m actually happy with the results. They were using their notes. I don’t know what the hell is going on.