These are questions I often get from friends at home and new people I meet. "Like" and "enjoy" would not really be appropriate words to use for what is happening in my life in a little corner of North Mississippi. Neither would they be an appropriate measure for what I feel to be the worth of what I am doing here.
"I'm glad I'm doing this," I can say on my good days. "It's exhausting. It's a struggle, but I'm making it," I can say on most. "I'm pushing through Friday to Friday," I say on others.
The experience is less difficult than I thought it would be in many ways but as difficult as I thought it would be in others. Summer school was a roller coaster, a whirlwind. It was painful, and then it was numbing. I think I was in shock. Each day I felt like I could step on a land mine at any moment and end up with the most vulnerable parts of me blown to pieces in a room full of overgrown eleventh and twelfth graders just dying to make a summer classroom a fun spectacle of gladiatorial hilarity. Excuse all the mixed metaphors. I'll go with it. Basically just picture me exploding on a roller coaster in the middle of a gladiator pit while 17-21-year olds point, laugh, and throw spitballs. Welcome to English 11/12. A place to teach and learn? Hardly. A place where you'll get out alive? Likely.
I felt so helpless and never knew what to expect. I just knew to expect something horrible. But that mess of intestines and tendons blast-strewn across trees turned into something beautiful. It made me brace myself for two terrible, horrible, no good, very bad years.
Those are two terrible, horrible years that I'm not going to have. (And not because I'm packing up and going home.)
Waking up at 5 a.m. when it's dark, and you feel like no other person in your time zone is living--it's hard for a day. It's really hard when one day turns into another and another until you've been wrenching yourself out of bed IN THE ABSOLUTE DARK OF NIGHT for 7 weeks.
It's hard to get used to saying the same thing five times in a day, operating like a robot on replay, giving out consequences with the same objective detachment in every hour. "Won't there be a day when they just know how to act?" "No. There will not be," you soon realize.
It's hard to feel like you'll never get ahead, like there will always be one (or three) too many assignments to grade, parents to call, homeroom paperwork fluff to turn in, lessons to plan, pieces of paper to pick up off the floor, and readings to do for your grad school classes. Oh, and that planning period of yours? You may end up subbing for another teacher, which means that your only window for peeing between 7:25 a.m. and 3:35 p.m. has just been closed.
It's tough as hell. Every day you just have to keep going, keep moving, never stop, keep going. There's a huge difference, though, between summer school and real school for me. I know most of my students respect me. I know that I'm in charge. I know that I'm a real teacher with real consequences. And I can dish them out. I know that when a few kids are actin' a fool, at least half of the class is probably thinking, "Why they gotta be so difficult? I just want to learn." Ok, maybe that's wishful thinking, but I don't think it's too far of a stretch. I know that I genuinely like a lot of them and that even that kid who's giving me trouble may point to my Eiffel Tower figurine on my desk at the end of the day and ask, "Mrs. Gray, you been there?"
I still live Friday to Friday. I still groan multiple times every morning and drag my feet on the way to school. I still love and crave being at home more than I ever have in my life. But I think I'm going to be alright.
Plus, Quentin and I are joining a church choir in Holly Springs, and we'll be participating in the Christmas Cantata. Can life be too bad? No, it's getting better all the time.
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