regret – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

kindergarten-cop-movie-clip-screenshot-shut-up_large Actually, first things first: I owe Katherine Lampe a review for her book The Unquiet Grave and haven’t written it yet because lazy; in the meanwhile if you need something to read and have already read all of my books I strongly recommend you go pick it up. I will be out of town all weekend at a baby shower/family reunion thing, so I’ll have to get a bunch of posts pre-written; that will probably be one of them.

Anyway.

I have found that I’m in exactly the same position that I was in at this time last fall, that being that I don’t actually know what my job is going to be in two weeks and so I can’t plan for anything yet. I’m still at school every day, mind you, doing various things that are not getting a classroom ready, because if I’m not teaching I’m not expending effort on the complicated process of getting a room set up.

I screwed up today, though. I looked in the computer to see if my classes were set up yet, assuming I’m actually teaching. And they are. And I spent most of the afternoon learning about the kids I have coming. And also taking the several boxes of math manipulatives and other teaching supplies that I unpacked yesterday and moving them into “my” classroom. Assuming I’m teaching.

Goddammit.

I know better than this. These girls all look smart and adorable, because the photos attached to their records are their fourth-grade pictures, and they’re all dolled out in their best clothes and are smiling and this happens every year, where I look at a bunch of pictures of kids and spend my time pleasantly thinking about potential and hoping and forgetting about all the bullshit. And it’s the bullshit that’s gonna kill me.

(I should be clear. Have I said this yet? If I’m teaching next year, by which I mean in thirteen days, I will only be teaching girls. I’m not just looking at the girls in my upcoming classes. That would be kinda creepy.)

Some of these kids are going to turn out to be assholes. A lot of them will turn out to be immense drama queens. Some of them, through no fault of their own, will be immense pains in my ass that I will do my damnedest to work with. Some will struggle and some will coast and some will not care no matter what I do. And some of them will be awesome.

Some of them will be all these things depending on the day of the week.

Or, y’know, maybe I won’t be a teacher next year at all, and I won’t have to worry about it. Supposedly I find out tomorrow. I know myself, and I know how the last several years have gone; the world is better off (my family is certainly better off) with me not in a classroom.

But I admit it. Right now, I miss it.

…and thus ends Year Eleven. Or Year Thirteen, depending on how you count. I’ve been a teacher for thirteen years, but since I took two off from regular employment– ie, my job got cut and I had to go to grad school to get an MA– I’ve got eleven years of teaching experience in those thirteen years. I count experience.

My homeroom last year was my favorite class I’ve ever had, and my second group honestly wasn’t too far off from them. I remember saying to anyone that would listen (and I’ve probably got it in print on some abandoned blog somewhere or another) that I was certain I was going to pay for that this year. I could not have possibly been more right.

I haven’t disliked a class as much as I disliked this year’s homeroom since at least Chicago, and it’s possible that I’ve gone from my favorite class ever to my least favorite class ever in a three-month period. I suspect that in reality I disliked the Chicago kids– especially my second group– more, because at the end of that class I quit and didn’t look back, and I’m not seriously considering quitting next year. But they were six years ago, and time has smoothed over much of their rough edges. This class is still raw.

Here’s the weird thing about teaching, though: with one single exception (one kid, a transfer late in the year, I never managed to find a way to click with) I genuinely liked all of my individual students this year, even the ones that were enormous pains in the ass– and the large majority of them qualify as enormous pains in the ass. As a group, unfortunately, they were fucking toxic. Five or six kids with bad enough ADHD to destroy a classroom all by themselves, plus a couple of thug-asshole wannabes and a handful of kids who just didn’t give a shit about anything at all makes for a rough, rough goddamn year. Plus, of course, another handful of kids I’d be willing to move a mountain for who had to put up with everybody else’s shit all year anyway.

Let’s be honest, though: I don’t get along with males in general; I have virtually no close male friends and generally don’t associate with men if I can avoid it. I was never going to be a good fit for an all-boys class. I just don’t have the temperament for it. Next year it looks like we’re going to have one all-boys class, one all-girls class, and two mixed groups. I’m going to fight to get the girls group and one of the mixed groups. (And, honestly, this is probably how it’ll work out anyway, since my partner teacher is also better with girls, and at least one of the other pair of teachers prefers to work with boys.) This year didn’t work out in a lot of ways, or at least didn’t work out very well with one of my classes. The girls group I did pretty well with; the boys were generally a yearlong exploration of the various ways I can fail as an educator with a couple of inexplicable times where I managed to get their competitive sides activated and we did outstandingly well at something (one unambiguous good thing about that group: tell them they were competing against the rest of the school and they’d kick ass; we won two different schoolwide competitions last year and came in second in a third, plus ended up fifth or sixth out of 20-some-odd homerooms in a competition I didn’t even realize we were in. I just wish I could have convinced them that their damn math assignments were a competition.

All that, and I still have to wait another month or five weeks or so for their goddamn ISTEP scores. The clusterfuck that was this year’s ISTEP administration is something that I’m sure I’ll get into later, and I am not.happy with the fact that I wasn’t able to share the scores with them at the end of the year, to say nothing of the fact that I can’t see them myself. (I can produce evidence that, despite all their nonsense, they were learning, and somehow appeared to be learning well— but like ’em or not the ISTEP is the King of Scores, and I can’t really put this year to bed until I know what happened.

So, yeah. I’ve been sitting in my classroom listening to Crystal Bowersox for some reason and writing this because I’m not sure what I want to do when I leave the building– which doesn’t mean that I’ve got anything left to do here, and judging from the lack of sound and movement in the hallway it looks like everybody else is done and dusted by now. Maybe I’ll go shopping or something; who the hell knows. Go home and clean. I dunno; I’ll figure something out.

Must do better next year.