Hello Friends,
Time is a funny thing.
It’s one of the few aspects of our lives, outside of ourselves, that is truly relative. Sure, it’s constant, and flies, and is of the essence, and waits for no [wo]man, and is on my side (yes, it is), but it’s also deeply personal. It could feel like a whim, or an eternity, all depending on individual agenda. And which end of the timeline a respective goal may reside, of course.
Take a month, for example.
Seems long, doesn’t it? Especially when you say it like that. A month. A whole month. A whole damn, monkey-fisting month.
That’s a long time.
It’s roughly four weeks long, lasts anywhere between twenty-eight and thirty-one days, and makes up one-twelfth of our calender year. It’s two paychecks, approximately twenty work days, one sick day (*coughcough* yes, already *coughcough*), an already-failed Giants season, and, of course, four quality episodes of “The Vampire Diaries” …uh, I mean “Impractical Jokers”.
That’s a long time.
And yet it’s only as long as you perceive it to be.
I can say “My summer’s been over for a month already,” and it seems like that carefree lifestyle of sitting around with my thumb up my a** (figuratively speaking) and pounding my son’s Oreos (not so figuratively speaking) whilst staying up late (past midnight, eh-gad!), Netflix bingeing, and spending every waking moment with my favorite two-year old was a lifetime ago. But when I say, “I’ve only been back to work for a month”, it feels so miniscule in the grand scheme of things.
Which is exactly how the past month has felt for me. One month back at work and it somehow feels to have both flown by and dragged worse than Joseph Merrick’s berries. But to understand where I’m coming from here, perhaps it would help to learn about what has happened during my first month back at school.
You see, in one month back, I’ve already had one student refer to a number two pencil as a “hashtag two pencil”, another spell manslaughter as manslutter, and a third fill out every out every possible bubble on their Scantron test.
Why? Because frick me, that’s why.
I’ve had one student essentially stalk me every period to learn if I’ve yet to read the zombie book he suggested (who then, consequently, yells at me for having yet to follow through with, what was apparently, a promise), another one arguing with me about why the government shut down (despite the fact that I’ve never offered up a view of my own), while another tries to explain the philosophic intricacies behind the “Breaking Bad” finale.
Keep in mind they’re all 8th graders.
At Open House I had parents asking me for less homework, more homework, more reading, less reading, more writing, less writing, and less standardized testing.
… at least we could all agree on something.
The day after Open House I had one student tell me that her mom “Reeeeeeeally liked me” and another say that his dad wished he had my hair.
I’ve had my class stolen by a colleague (deservingly so), five students draw ME when asked to create an illustration for the vocabulary word ‘egotism’, and another write an extra credit story in which I get mauled by a plus-sized woman in an elevator.
I’ve had my patchy eyebrow, my limited facial-hair growing capabilities, and my child-naming skills all called into question, and my penchant for dark colors and vests (‘eff you, Mr. Schu and countless hipsters out there, I was rocking the vests way before they were cool… they are cool now, right) really called into question.
And I’ve stopped a communist attack and diffused a bomb.
… alright, maybe that last bit wasn’t true. But all the rest of it was.
And it may not seem like much when crammed together in blog-form, but when you spread that out amongst some twenty-odd (very odd) days of instruction, and compound it all with parent-teacher conferences, faculty meetings, department meetings, team meetings, professional development, creating work, marking papers, creating lessons, instituting lessons, finding supplementary work, inputting grades, assemblies, pep rallies, field trips, trips to the library media center, and building rapport with each and every student, the time allotted within those twenty-something days becomes increasingly limited.
And then to try to balance that with a family, social life, and suffering writing career… well, that’s how one month can seem so quick and yet so slow at the same time. When the moments within it are enough to make you want to cringe and smile, cry and laugh your ass off, crawl back into bed and yet, somehow, still anticipate the day.
Sometimes, over longer vacations, I forget why I got into education in the first place. When the smell of crappy cafeteria food circulating the hallways and cacophony of a hundred screaming adolescent time bombs fades and becomes just a joke or memory or story at an opportune time. Then the dread sets in as the vacation comes to an end, as the new school year looms like an impending storm. It’s easy to forget why you do it in the first place.
Thankfully, however, it’s even easier to remember.
And it didn’t take a month for that revelation, it took a day. All the following days from that hectic month forth, both the good and the bad, are just more constant, refreshing reminders as to why we do what we do.
Every day is quick and eternal, every week flies and drags, every month is fleeting and never-ending. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Because I never want this time to end.
I wonder what next month will bring.
Live, Love, Learn,