Have you ever had just one of those days? The one where your planning gets taken up by something irrelevant to you at that moment, some training or somebody needed coverage… So you go in to class feeling exhausted before you start… and one of your students makes some comment that isn’t appropriate but not necessarily discipline worthy and you decide to investigate… and wind up learning something completely heartbreaking… Something that NO teenager should ever have to deal with… and you just can’t get your grove back after that… The chocolate doesn’t help, the griping at the “water cooler” doesn’t help, the reading blog posts doesn’t help and all YOU wanted to do today was teach, just teach your content, in your room to your kids, all of whom you love in their own way. Today was that day for me.
One of those days where you are soul weary before lunch. So I went a read a blog post… something to cheer me up right? Wrong… I completely agreed with the premise but the solutions provided were all trite and things I learned in my teacher prep program from people who had never taught K-12. NOT helping!!! Teaching can be such a lonely profession sometimes… Yeah I was in a building with 600 other people but I couldn’t connect because I was so disconnected from the day. I was so wrapped up in what I had learned that I couldn’t care about the fact that I have new responsibilities or that I had car duty in the rain. I just couldn’t care about the trivial stuff.
It’s those days that I remember why I’m still in the classroom… That I remember that I do this job for my students… each and every one of them… I’m here, fighting the good fight, because I care about kids. Truly, deeply, madly care about kids. ‘Cause they are AWESOME. Not to mention that even when I was zoned out and struggling today my kids still made me laugh, still made me connect to math, still made me give them all I had. So even though today was ROUGH, I can feed my students’ minds.
Musings of a wandering math teacher... 