Blue Light Special

It’s the weirdest thing… Today, as we were writing in our student planners (or, more accurately, while I was taking attendance and the students were writing in their planners), a student said, “Oh, it’s Yom Kippur today!” I gave him a weird look, and he laughed and said, “What? It’s an important celebration day for my people.” I said, “Are you Jewish?” to which he responded, “I’m a ginger.” …as if that explained everything. This was new to me; I hadn’t heard of orange hair and pale, freckled skin as a common genetic pattern for Jewish people. Out of curiosity, I asked if he was Irish, and he said, “I’ll be Irish tomorrow.” (…again, as if that explained everything. This student has a fantastic dead-pan delivery.) But for today, he was content to stay Jewish. I asked him how he would celebrate Yom Kippur, and he said he would, and I quote, “Party down with my goats and yaks.” (And after all, isn’t that what Yom Kippur is for?) Yes, he said yaks. He informed me that yaks are very popular these days.

As if that weren’t strange enough, in a later class period, another student noticed the same holiday in the planner and then made a similar comment about it. When I looked at him askance, he laughed and asked if he could bring a yak to school for a class party. I can’t imagine that this was a coincidence – two different boys talking about yaks on the same day? I responded to this second student (who is not a ginger, in case you were wondering) by asking, “Why does everyone have yaks all of a sudden?” By way of a response, the second student said to me, “I think there was a yak sale at K-Mart.”

It's Like a Mosh Pit in Here

So we made it through the first week of school unscathed – mostly. Schedules are mostly settled, lockers are mostly assigned, and students mostly know how to open them, the kids are mostly behaving themselves… And I’m mostly exhausted. I have the largest homeroom class in the 7th and 8th grades with 34 students. When I walk into my class in the morning, passing the silent 28 kids next door, I walk into chatter. My regular classes are the same. After homeroom, I have a class of 31. After lunch, I have a class of 34. And after prep, I have a class of (*gulp*) 36. I spend most of my time shushing them. Okay, maybe not most of my time, but it certainly feels like it! I’m not exaggerating when I say that I have to shush them every 5 minutes, if not before. Every time there’s a break or a shift in the lesson, they start talking. Every time there is a transition or they have to get something out or put something away, they start talking. Every time I so much as PAUSE in what I’m saying, someone starts talking! (Seriously. They would make mincemeat of William Shatner.) In the middle of class on Friday, I was trying to give the instructions for a group activity that required them to move around in the classroom, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by the impossibility of the plan. There are just SO MANY of them…

Sometimes people seem surprised that I work during my summers. I spend my summer running summer day camps with my husband and three other leaders. We have 35 kids every week, and we organize field trips, lead games and activities, manage behavior, make them wash their hands a lot, etc. People seem so surprised that I would eat up my summer vacation time working, but it really is a vacation for me. All those kids, and FIVE leaders… It’s heaven. Now, back in my classroom, I keep looking around for some other leader to handle something on the other side of the room while I manage whatever crisis is closest to me. Tell me again why I’m supposed to be opposed to robot teachers taking over my profession?

Here We Go Again

It’s time to dust off the bookshelves and line up the desks and clean out the clutter left behind in June’s hasty exit. It’s time to crack open the textbook and make plans and curriculum maps and assignments and units and tests. It’s time to sit in meetings, itching to have more time in the classroom, desperately wishing that the speaker/principal/teacher/district office administrator would finish this part of the inservice so you can all get back to prepping for the school year. It’s time to fire up the desk computer and root around in electronic storage closets for documents you swear you saved because you just knew you’d use them again (hopefully today!), but just cannot seem to locate now, as you can’t remember what any of the cleverly-named files on your flash drive/server/desktop are actually for. It’s time to wade through a daunting mountain of emails in your inbox, to chuckle over the emails that were so crucial in June but no longer matter, and to grumble in frustration when the important email about the first day of school/locker assignments/teacher contract/building security schedule/whatever won’t print because the printer in your pod isn’t back from it’s imaginary vacation yet.

It’s an exciting and aggravating time of year. Back to the classroom… and back to the blog.

I had lofty goals at the start of the break about continuing to blog all summer long, but somewhere in June I decided to do myself a favor and take the non-school months off. If my blog is a window into my classroom and into my life as a teacher, then I probably don’t need to keep the window open when no one is home, so to speak. (I seem to have a serious thing for analogies… I’ll have to monitor that.) At any rate, taking the summer off proved to be a wise choice for me as a blogger, as my graduate classes took up most of my time, and the rest was filled by my summer job. (Note to self: do NOT try to double up on 5-week, 3-credit classes again. It might actually kill you.) But I’ve survived the crazy summer and feel NO need to tell the tale, so I will be settling back into teaching, a school schedule, and my odd little blog.

Today is the first day of school for 6th graders, although 7th and 8th graders don’t start until tomorrow. Yesterday was sunny and warm and lovely, but somewhere in the night, the weather figured out that today is a school day in September and that we live in Portland… so today it’s raining. A lot. Today’s rain features heavy, wet drops falling straight down – guaranteed to soak you on your short trek from car to school doors. The 6th graders are trudging in with a weird aura of excitement and despair surrounding them… (As I notice these things, I catch myself thinking, “This job is SO WEIRD.”) I have to go down to the gym to help the little 6th graders find their homeroom classes now. As I say in class (more times than I want to admit) -- onward and upward!