Here I Go Again...

(with all due apologies to Whitesnake.  and to you for the 80s rock reference.)

The summer is officially over in one hour.  Tomorrow is the first day of the new school year.  I can't even feel like I am going back to the same school this year for so many reasons. Everything feels different.

For one thing, so many of the faces I had come to know as the rock-steady foundation of our faculty are gone.  They retired, sought other opportunities.  There are certain of them I just cannot imagine our school without, to be honest.  While a part of me knows that institutions transform themselves or die, I am certain I will be looking for those faces like ghosts in the halls.

This summer has also been full of revolutions in my personal life:  Brazil, my uncle's death, the massive overhaul on my house, getting off the Topamax.  Huge chunks of the puzzle of my life have been pried loose, shuffled around, and the picture just doesn't look the same anymore.  I don't think that's a bad thing.  To have gone through all of that and be completely the same would be the bad thing, probably.

There's also the fact that I am nervous about this year, student-wise.  I had some of the most genuinely discouraging moments of my career last year, things that stole that feeling of "rightness" I have always had with my kids.  Sure, every year brings its own challenges, and true, the vast majority of last year's students were wonderful people whom I will deeply miss.  I need that to be understood.  I don't want it ever said that I did not like last year's class or that I put them down here.  They were a vibrant group of individuals with a distinct personality to them, and they frequently made me laugh.  In all honesty, though, there were also some things that happened that made me feel that what I do is an exercise in futility.

I've had students be confrontational with me.  I've had students get in my face or get into fights with other students.  I've had to deal with exceptionally thorny discipline issues and "battles of the wills."   All of that goes with the territory.  I never take it personally even when it is directed at me.  It's about something else almost always, and I just happen to be a handy target.  Even when it does seem to be a personality conflict, it gets dealt with and we move on.  I'm not in a popularity contest.  I'm trying to teach somebody, a whole lot of somebodies, something.  This past year is the first year ever that I can honestly say a student managed to hurt me and did it deliberately, with planning, deception, and a little song in the heart.  That's just never been a part of my reality before, and now I have to fight the urge to see a knife in every hand waiting for me to turn around so it can find a place to sink in.  I don't want to teach that way.  I don't want to live that way.  It makes everything inside my soul grey and dull.

So I came out of last year with scars, and now I'm a little worried.  How will it go this year?  I have very high hopes and am enthusiastic about it going in.  I have two new electives.  We're going to block schedule.  I am going to be integrating a class exchange with my host teacher from Brazil into my curriculum.  So far, in my very limited interactions with this year's class, I feel like the echoes of the past will just fade out, but I won't be able to tell until I actually get in the room and get everything underway.  Hopefully, the enthusiasm I have for all the wonderful things we're doing this year will carry us.

Well, it's late, and 5:00 will roll around appallingly fast.  Three days of PD preparation, and then all questions will be answered.  I am fervently hoping that all will be well and that this optimism of mine, frequently woefully uninformed and out-of-place, is right this time.