Saturday, October 1, 2011

This Post Brought to You By...

What do you do when you are tired of being in sessions about teaching? Well, at first it was do work for the next week of actually teaching, but I've gotten pretty tired of that too, so it's on to writing the nearly, but not quite, forgotten blog. You see my week, every day, nearly every hour is taken up with thinking about my classroom, my lesson plans, my tests and quizzes, and my students and their success. It takes a lot of energy and it takes a lot of work and a lot of stress to get through all of these things--not much of a break you might guess. So when I have to go to Saturday Professional Development days you might guess that it is not the number one thing on my wish list for the day. Not even top ten actually. Instead of bringing the intense focus to Saturdays that I give to my school five days a week, which might actually kill me, as Mark Zuckerberg/Jessie Eisenberg would say to Saturday PD's, "You have part of my attention--you have the minimum amount." That's right I'm still remotely culturally relevant even as a middle school teacher. The rest of my attention is back planning for the next week, is developing my next unit test, is considering how in the world I am going to get a kid who hates school to love reading and writing.

Until of course my brain looks like the fried egg in that "this is your brain on drugs" commercial (cultural relevancy points dropping as I write, I know)--probably a poor analogy considering my work is in an attempt to avoid this trajectory for my students, but for some reason it's more fitting than any other I can think of (further proof it's a fitting analogy?) Now that my brain is a fried egg, I'm writing this blog instead of working on my lesson plans and unit exams. So I know my students won't experience quite the scattered craziness I've got going on right now. To you, my faithful readers, I must apologize for the "clear as mud" post. So what's the moral of today's post? (This is taking on a really odd PSA announcement tone). It might be don't do drugs, or don't become a teacher. But, I think one that would better help us all is give us teachers a break every now and again, it will help your kids I promise--and don't do drugs.