Teaching is.....

In 1981, at the tender age of eight, I purchased my very first album.  I remember the cost being about $9, so I know I would have had to save allowances for weeks to accumulate that princely sum.  The album?  Smurfing Sing Song.  Ten songs sung in Smurf voices filled the need for a smurfing good time while anxiously awaiting Saturday morning and a new Smurf cartoon.  Along with such cult classics as “You’re a Pink Toothbrush, I’m a Blue Toothbrush”, this album contained a song that I have just now realized is acting as the anthem to my teaching career.  I am not sure the name of the song, but the lyrics went something like this “I’m spinning around, I am up and I am down.  I’m taking a ride on this merry-go-round”.  Come to think of it, the title may have been “Merry-Go-Round” or maybe "Smurfy-Go-Round".

Funny blue creatures or harbingers of insanity?

People have asked me “How’s teaching?” or “Is teaching all that you thought it would be?” and I find that I don’t really have a standard answer.  I find myself answering “Great!” or “All of it and so much more!” because I don’t think I should answer “Soul sucking”.  That sounds defeated and I am not defeated, but I am definitely confused.

Teaching is a teeter-totter of insanity on its very best day.  If my lesson plans rock and kids are engaged, then my grading is behind and it’s a weekend of bending over papers at the kitchen table.  If I am up on my personal and professional development, I am very behind on being open and available to kids who need more help.  If I am stellar at school, I feel like I am sliding downhill at home.  I love the kids, but they drive me crazy.  I laugh reading their journals and want to cry because they make me so frustrated.  I had a kid I taught for six weeks last year tell my daughter that I was his favorite teacher ever and the very same day, someone put a nasty, stepped-on, exploded cheese stick on my desk with a note that read “With Love.”  What is this life??

My days aren’t only going up and down, they are being spun in a circle way too fast.  Any time I feel like I am getting my footing, something will start spinning the whole thing around from the outside.  Solid week of lessons planned out?  Oh, here’s an email saying you are now signed up for mandatory, professional development so scrap those and make sub lessons instead.  Connected with a class that was resistant?  SPINNNNNNNNNN, observation taking place in your worst behaved class later on today.  Acronyms, important and unimportant things relegated to acronyms, are going to be the death of me.  They spin and spin and spin with no foreseeable end.  I no longer have my hands up in the air saying “Wheeeee!” because one is over my nauseated mouth and the other is against my pounding head.

Somedays I drive home and think “What the hell was this day?”  I have left feeling not only ineffective as a teacher, but as a human as well.  But I have also watched that lightbulb come on over a student’s head who was struggling with an idea and that is beautiful.  I have lectured where every pair of eyes was on me and not only did they listen, they got it, and for twenty minutes I feel invincible.  I have gone into classes completely prepared and watch the lessons I so carefully crafted crash and burn and I have also gone in winging it and watched them soar.  Again, I wonder, what is this life????

I guess after a few years of this that perhaps the highs won’t be so high and the lows won’t be so very low and while things won’t ever be centered, they might not be so jarring.  Until then, I am going to find shelter in the presence of my coworkers; these beautifully creative and cynical people who just get it.  They know.  They share their own stories to make me feel better or their lesson plans when I am adrift.  They keep me laughing, they tell me it is okay to cry and assure me I am not going insane.  I will take the nice words of students and use them to build a wall of defense around my heart to shield it from the mean kids who try to pierce it.  I’ll listen to the wise words of my husband who reminds me that I am not ineffective as a human and who remembers how hard I worked to get here.  Maybe I will repurchase the Smurfing Sing Song and see what other gems those wise blue creatures have to share with me.  And the next time someone asks me how teaching is, I will smile and assure them it is so much more than I ever smurfing thought it would be.