A day in the life...

I have now been a real live teacher for about a week. Things are ridiculously exhausting, overwhelming, and going pretty well. My kids are funny, ornery, crazy, and sweet. Some of them can hardly write and I'm convinced others are smarter than I am. To give you some idea what life has been like for the past week or so (and will be for the foreseeable future), I thought I would give you a glimpse into my daily routine.

4:50 am: Alarm. I wake up with a slightly sinking feeling, "Oh no, I'm a teacher. What on earth am I thinking?" I'm looking forward to the day when that is not my first thought in the morning.

5:00am: I actually get up, get ready, assemble teacher outfit, gather mountains of papers, email my lesson plans to myself in case I lose the hardcopies in the blackhole of my folders, and save time to pray for the strength and wisdom I need to make it through the day.

6:20: We drive half an hour to school, listening to Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show on repeat when we need a morale boost (which is honestly most days...)

7:00: I race around the school building like a crazy person getting everything done for the day/cleaning my classroom/fixing the copy machine and about a million other things.

7:55: My first set of "babies" walks through the doors of Room 107. Thank goodness for my sweet homeroom that gives me a chance to warm up for the day and work out the kinks in my lesson plan. They also offer great suggestions like "Ms. P., if you want to use an example of a high cell phone bill, you should use $500, not $200, because mine is like $186 and that's not really that high!"

Then the day runs without stopping until 3. In that time, I see 160 kids in six 42 minute class with 3 minute passing periods in between. I feel like someone threw a babysitter, a circus performer, a counselor, and a professor in a blender, and I popped out. It is exhausting to be "on" all day, and constantly having someone (or 28 someones) needing me. But some of the hardest things are also the best, and as I get to know my kids (and their 160 names), I remember why I'm here. My classes behave pretty well for the most part except one that someone must feed massive amounts of sugar, rocket fuel, or whatever it is middle schoolers run on, before they send them to me. They currently kick my butt everyday and when I finish this, I need to call about six of their parents.

at about 5 pm, I get home, laugh/cry/dream about 9-5 jobs with my roommates, cook dinner (and by cook, I mean assemble and by dinner, I mean pbj), stare at my computer for a while hoping it will lesson plan by itself, make a few phone calls, miss a few more phone calls, and talk myself into staring at the computer again. I then write a plan for the next day, dream a little about someday being ahead on my planning, rearrange some papers in the growing mound of my worksheets/exit slips/homework/info sheets, and then give up and put them all back in the same folders.

I crash around 10 and decide that instead of sitting at my desk not getting anything done, I should go to bed and not get anything done. I sleep like a rock until that alarm goes off at 4:50.

"Oh no, I'm a teacher. What on earth am I thinking?"

Then I think about the girls who came to my room before going to the busses today, just to tell me goodbye and to have a good day, that they would see me tomorrow. And the sweet boy who came up to me at the end of my exhausting misbehaving class today to ask if he could help out by turning off the overhead projector for me. And the two girls who have burst into tears in front of me in an empty hallway telling me about really hard things going on in their lives.

Then I drag my sleepy, grouchy self out of bed, and I start the day all over again.