My first week as a teacher at my new/old school is done. It fairly flew by. I'm tired, but not the bone-weary exhaustion I have felt, not the "and-I-have-to-do-this-again-how-long?" that I've known before. My co-workers are so tremendously helpful and welcoming, the students are well-behaved (for the most part), and constant little drops of happiness (treats in the lounge, a free shirt, jeans on Friday, a goodie bag from a student organization) keep coming along.
The little details, in fact, keep blowing me away. The food in the cafeteria is genuinely good, and there is always enough of it. There are several choices for entrees, lovely vegetables all the time, ice cream and ice-cold bottled water in a cooler at the register. Nobody winds up with quickly-reheated chicken patties and corn. I heard a student in line say, in fact, "Yeah, my mom always packs me a lunch, but sometimes that's not so good, so I always get a tray." It's quiet enough to have a normal conversation in the cafeteria. My head doesn't pound because of the noise.
I'm starting to stop looking for the other shoe, but I can't quite let go of the fear that it is going to drop at some point. I don't know how long I will keep subconsciously waiting for that thud that means some hidden cray-cray is coming out of the closet. I know I can't keep living like that, though, always looking over my shoulder, so deliberately, I'm trying to focus on all the good.
Part of me misses my old home for so long, too. I sort of miss the view out of my second-floor windows and those long, comforting, red-brick halls. I wonder how my newspaper staff is getting on. I worry about my teacher friends left behind there. I hope that things are somehow managing to change for the better for them, too.
For the most part, though, the relief of not having to be in that environment of stress is nearly overwhelming. I get up in the morning, and I don't dread the day. When I reach my planning period, I get things done or visit with one of my fellow teachers. I don't have to just sit behind my desk for awhile and try to get myself together for the rest of the day. And while I have mostly kept my rule about school work being done at school and home being about home, I will admit that I sat here the past two nights slicing open tennis balls that someone donated to me so I could put them on the bottoms of my desk legs next week to silence the noise of desk movement. I felt good about doing it, too.
I also had enough time and energy to find a new lesson plan template and beat it into submission. It was enjoyable to do stuff like that again in a way that the vast majority of things related to education had not been for me in longer than I care to contemplate. I actually did it before they were due instead of putting it off needlessly as a form of avoidance of something that was frustrating and that I could not change. This time, I didn't feel angry when I worked on the lesson plans because they didn't have to be filled with random glittery bits of edutrendiness that had been culled from some seminar someone had been to or had seen online. They're set up my way for my classes, are easily adaptable, are actually legitimately reusable since they're in Excel (not my favorite thing, but very good for this sort of document as it turns out). I'm going to be able to print them off and use all of them, not just have pages and pages of stuff I have to shuffle through to get to the useful bits. It's deeply satisfying to have my plans be a tool to run my class again and not something hijacked for another purpose.
Next week will be a much more accurate sample of what everything is actually going to be like. All the new will be worn off, and everyone will be settling in to their regular behaviors. That hovering shoe might be about to make its appearance known. Or not. I'm going to try to be so busy being happy and making things good for my students that I don't notice one way or the other.
