The Very Tired Teacher

T-minus....

4 more days of school
6 more days until the D.C. trip
10 days until my summer break begins


I've been very calm and unaltered about the end of school....something I've deliberately practiced in order to make it to the end and not flake out as a teacher. I HAVE to be diligent about their grades. But today is the last big push. If I can grade like an efficient maniac today, I feel like I'll be golden. I've been living like this....'every minute counts, but I'm still praying and still calm' for a long time, and it seems like I'll never stop living like this.





I've been forgetting key peoples' birthdays and graduations or the fact that people have called me, and instead been living in lots of the details. This is generally pretty unnatural for me so it takes a lot of my focus. This week I've been having anxiety dreams....I can tell. Seasons for everything, ebb and flow, on and on and on. We know the cliche sayings. I am saying them because they are true.


I am hoping that the weird dreams subside soon though. I wanted to finish one of the Hunger Games books because a student had lent it to me, and because I read it all at once and it taps on your views of survival, I definitely dreamt about that too. Creepy. Last night I was tossing and turning but too out of it to wake myself up....and I was dreaming about endlessly grading portfolios. And that's just lame.


Last time I wrote in this post, I mentioned the importance of closings. And it's still an important thing. I'm just going to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing now. In living life, I have found that what calms me down is writing on a page. Every morning, usually at the crack of dawn with really good coffee, I sit down at my desk and open the window and the morning is all for me and my own thoughts. And this is what carries me through the day....the solitude, the time to remember and be with God, the morning air. I LOVE mornings.


Next week we will all be getting up at 6:00 am every day, and I have to remind myself to give the students a little bit of a break when they show surprise at first about the early wake up call. They'll get up. They always do....adrenaline for the day propels them to it. We will drive from Virginia to D.C., and in the morning I will be the cheery one. And at the end of the day when I'm blinking back sleep and their voices are getting louder and louder for no apparent reason, I will make sure to be highly caffeinated.


Oh yes, I remember this now. Last year I drank down lots of caffeinated drinks at dinner every night, just so I could make it to lights out and checking in on everyone. The chaperone can't fall asleep first. And sometimes when everyone else is a little crabby, the chaperone has to smile and continue to set the tone. Not in a Stepford wives way, but in a REAL way. 

Smiling helps. And so does writing on the page in the early morning.


Yesterday it was clear to me that it was the last week of school for two reasons. First, what is keeping us together is respect. When we're tired, all of us at school are banking on our manners and what we've set up in the year so that we can keep having fun together. For this reason I have not found it very stressful to be with middle schoolers this week at all. I genuinely like them. We've had good moments together. And now we're celebrating the end.


I noticed this at all when one of my students came up to me and said, 'I'm nervous that next week if I get really tired on the trip I'm going to say something mean or disrespectful to you.' Well. No one has ever said that before to me. But I saw what she was getting at. I said to her that I absolutely could not picture that, but if it did happen she knows I would be compassionate about things and have a conversation with her. And if it was completely out of line, I could, as she knows, become very direct.

I was basically saying, 'I will still be myself, and I am still your teacher.' In the end it's really amazing how simple things can be.   It reminded me to think of the things that I will need too.  Mostly from the other chaperones when we are tag teaming it.


The second thing that tipped me off to the last week of school was that I started to say my inner thoughts more freely in front of the 7th grade. A kid was asking me a question, and the only thing I thought, and then said, was, 'You remind me of some kid movie star.' And then someone said, 'Totally! He does. Like from the 80s?' And I said, 'No, like from the 90s.' And they were at a loss, because while they were actually born in the late 90s (weird, I know) they do have a shocking knowledge of the great 80s movies from before their time.

But for a second I did go back to the 80s.  And then I just said it. 'Sometimes a few of you in this class seem like you could be The Goonies'. And the class actually started cheering. Reason number 5,642 that I love teaching middle school.

And then I went one step farther and pointed out one kid in particular, and said, 'I've always thought you could lead some adventure through a furnace and actually be successful about it. Like a Goonie.' And there was more cheering, and I thought, 'Jessica, close this up.  This may be hilarious, or this might be really weird.' At the end of the year, I don't really have a radar for interpreting the thing I just said. 

Hello, lack of perception and fatigue.

Almost done! Now I'm going to do some more grading. My theory today is that since I'm finishing them, I may not have to dream about them tonight.