Teaching: The Good, the Bad, and the Funny

I am a teacher. This is the profession I willingly and excitedly chose. I knew I wanted to be a teacher when I was ten. I knew I wanted to share my love of learning with others and inspire them to be more.

I think about that dream I had, even as I started my first year as a naive teacher. I thought I could change the world. How different and difficult reality is. There are so many things about our education system that are broken. That seem unfixable. That don't make sense. That suck.

But having said that, it's not all bad. As teachers we tend to focus on the negative aspects of our job, I think because there are a lot of them. A lot of big, bad negatives that make our lives hell. But there are also a lot of wonderfully amazing aspects as well. The things that make us go back everyday. The things that help me realize that I am fulfilling my dream, even if only for one student.

I want to start blogging again. I want to start sharing my opinions, my thoughts, and my stories from teaching. The good, the bad, and the funny. Some days will be about the positives. Some days I'll focus on the negatives. Some days I'll just share funny stories, because let me tell you how hilarious 6th graders can be sometimes.

Today I simply want to share a meme I saw earlier that made me laugh. It's fall break right now, which means two days of catching up. Yesterday I caught up on laundry, vacuuming, other cleaning, and sleep (a three hour nap in the late afternoon). Today I'm catching up on anything else that I can do to avoid catching up on grading.... Grading really is the worst. I've been way better about it this term than I ever have in the past, but I've still managed to get far enough behind that I'm avoiding it. It's just not much fun having to waste my time looking at students' perfunctory work and taking the effort to grade it when they obviously didn't take any effort when they did the work in the first place. (I looked up synonyms for half-assed because I didn't think that sounded very professional. I thought perfunctory sounded like a good vocab work that I'm going to teach my kids on Monday when I give them their progress reports.) Anyways, the meme: