Unfortunately, the new school year is right around the corner. I hate to sound like a sourpuss, but, I am hesitant to be excited this year. I know once I get a whiff of brand new crayons and freshly sharpened pencils, AKA teacher crack, I will more joyful at the expectation of 38 new, eager little minds and personalities to match.
But I have been to work for two days already. Packing. Moving. Doing heavy lifting. Leaving my classroom and moving to a new one. One with little to no storage. One with a joke of a dry erase boards. One with tables so huge and heavy, it took four adult women to move.
I am grateful to God in heaven that I have been physically active this summer. Because if I hadn't, I would be in some SERIOUS pain. More than I am right now, as I clutch the aspirin bottle for dear life.
My co teacher is extending her maternity leave until November. A move I applaud loudly and joyfully. You only have your first baby once. Once the second comes along, you can't physically do all the things you did with baby two as you did with baby one. God bless her, she came in to help with the move. She has packed, shuttled, and escaped many a roach in the last couple of days.
My new co teacher is pretty awesome as well. She is a parent of a former student and was a full time teacher in a life before her three children. She is easing back into the maelstrom of education and I am thrilled that she was assigned to me. She and her kids, along with my two older boys and I, have spent the better part of two days hauling stuff into the universe's joke of a classroom.
Normally, I wouldn't care. But I am having serious issues. Placement of items, where to store books, if we will ever get to open the locked storage room that torments and jeers at us as we perspire and ache as we prepare.
It is funny. When school begins this year, I will have opened SIXTEEN school years. Every year, I feel the anxiety of the deadline of the first day of school as it looms. The unpacking, the sorting, the counting, the endless meetings and trainings, the relearning of colleagues names as we set sail into another year of adventure.
Regardless of how much time passes, the thrill never escapes me. It's as though all the bitching about the moving and changes is cathartic in a way that promises the gleam of my new crop of brains. Brains that I will mold and train, question and challenge, inspire and educate. That thrill of the first day, the eager but nervous smiles, the questioning looks to each other, combined with the heavenly smell of brand new everything is intoxicating.
And it will get me through the crap I will go through with my trusty entourage, the classroom fairies, if you will, to get everything just so for my new kids.
Another batch, another year, same saddle.
And although my legs, arms and back ache like hell, there is no place I would rather be.
Except, maybe, for my old classroom.
It's funny, I think this is my 14th year. I am surprisingly and frighteningly calm. But then again, I also did not have to move and I have my lovely NORMAL classroom, which you are more than welcome to store anything you'd like to in....! And I, too, always get excited...in spite of my complaining, I do love this job, still.
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