Sunday, September 10, 2006

time just keeps tick, tick, tickin'

I realized this weekend that I had just finished my fourth week of teaching on Friday. This is amazing. Institute was five weeks long and we taught for four. Starting tomorrow I will be teaching longer as a regular teacher than I did at institute. I just can't believe how fast this all goes by.

On one hand it is amazing. I've been teaching for a whole month and it's going okay. Yes I hate the system, yes I am still working relentlessly to get my fourth hour to understand the concept of shutting their mouths and yes I'm concerned that I may never have a normal life again, but I like it. I take that back, I love it. What makes me angry keeps me going. What makes me happy keeps me going. My kids and the looks on their faces and the knowledge that every day I am fighting to give them a better chance in this world keeps me going. I don't know that I've ever felt so much purpose or drive in my entire life. I want to bottle this feeling so that I never lose it.

On the other hand, it's all very scary. We're a month in and they're still moving kids around. We have a new team time on Monday. I don't know if I'm really going as fast as I should be with my kids, but Mallory and Ms. Reece are all at different places too, so I need to figure out how to mesh those together. That and I need to get the kids ready for TAKS testing in February. If one month is gone already, what is Thanksgiving or Christmas going to look like? Are we still going to be dealing with class leveling and random schedule changes? Am I going to have my pacing down and have a tutorials system set up? I keep telling myself to go one step at a time, but this is all so much. It's been one month and I'm where I wanted to be and I'm not where I wanted be. Perhaps I should stop thinking about this for the moment.

Lets just leave it at this. During institute, a very wise person told me a month after I started teaching I would be positive of one of two things: I would know that without a shadow of a doubt I would never be able to leave the educational movement and would be passionately involved in some way for the rest of my life or I would know that I was going to pour as much of myself as possible into my kids for two years and then I was going to follow my heart into something else that was worth wild, never forgetting the moments I had here in Houston (he didn't allow for the fact that I might be wondering if I was a good teacher, saying he already knew the answer from four weeks of institute). Besides being completely sweet and wonderful, he was dead right. One month and I know the answer.

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