Why tea kettles Whistle

"Patience: A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue." -- Ambrose Bierce

Actually, I value patience very highly. It's a very important part of my job. I pray for more all the time. Patience and wisdom are hard-won, though. Today and yesterday have been trying my patience in the extreme. I've figured out that it's not the heat under the kettle that causes the scream. It's the inability to vent in any other way.

Not the kids, first of all. They've not been worse than is normal. It's been a week of administrative mandates that have completely wrecked my lesson plans. We had to give a practice test for the big state test coming up later in the month. It's the 3rd time around on this, and even the slowest of my kids were saying, "We are doing this AGAIN?!?!" I explained that its purpose is to show how they've grown over the year and to point out any particular skills for practice before the real thing, but none of us could scrape up much enthusiasm for it.

We got word that the change had to be made on Wednesday. No kidding. Less than 24 hrs. notice. My Type-A personality took the change with all the grace of a freight train suddenly derailed. I HATE it when somebody changes set plans at the last minute. If it's a casual thing, it doesn't matter, but when I put as much work into planning and pacing my lesson plans, it's a big slap in the face to have them so carelessly swept aside.

So, teakettle-like, I've sat in my room, mostly at my desk, for the past two days. I have filed piles of papers, graded and recorded others, set up my computerized gradebook and started working on entering grades for it, and even hung some posters that had fallen long ago and been shoved into a corner. Things are spic-and-span (where did that phrase come from, anyway?) and ready for parent-teacher day on Monday. I hated it. Every minute of it. I felt useless. I wasn't helping them learn. All I was doing was babysitting and cleaning. I could feel the steam building, and by 7th period today, I wanted to shriek with it.

This isn't what we're supposed to be doing. We're supposed to be talking about To Kill a Mockingbird. They're supposed to be discovering how wonderful it is on their own. Instead, we killed two days. I can't remember the quote, but it says something like, "As if we could kill time without injuring eternity." Today, I think we gave it a nasty bruise, at the very least.

One of the things I'm going to have to learn is more flexibility, especially with the stupid trivialities that are so much a part of public education. I will just have to find a way to let it roll off my back. One of my friends was having a problem of patience and tolerance with a family member, and she developed the habit of saying, "Quack, quack" to remind herself to do that. I think I'm going to print that off the computer and put it somewhere on my desk. I need to be more duck and less teakettle.