enjoying the greener grass

warning: semi-pictureless, wordy, mundane post....no crafts though! lucky duck.

C-L-U-E-L-E-S-S

Its no secret that my year of teaching high school English was pretty--welllll, honestly--I can't think of the perfect word. It was rough. I do not have thick skin and I will never forget the insane amounts of sweat that spewed from my underarms during the 98 rushes of pure horrified adrenaline each day and the nightmares that followed me to bed each and every night. In retrospect, there were a few comical (NOW..not at the time) exchanges that I took part in or observed in the classroom. One of them being this:

(during reading of The Crucible)

student raises hand

G: yes?

student: I was wondering....

G: ok...

student: ok, so say like a woman gets pregnant with twins but like the twins have different dads. What does one twin call the other twin's dad?

G:

student: I'm serious. I want to know.

Or there was the time a girl asked me if she could leave her jacket on during class because she had forgotten to wear a bra that day. Or another time when a student handed in a jaw-dropping horrific pornographic narration that involved all of the male characters in Huck Finn. Or...there was the student that put his name down as "spicy wiener" on all of his assignments. Or the time that a parent told me a student was being "resourceful" by skipping the reading assignment and going straight to the Sparknotes. Or the time a student raised his hand in front of 29 other students to tell me that I had spinach in my teeth--that was a barrel of laughs. Or when a student handed in an entire Wikipedia article twice as a research paper and claimed to the vice principal that I hadn't made the assignment guidelines clear. Or when a student stuck a maxi pad to another unsuspecting and innocent student's back during class.  Or the time a student threw a banana peel at me and called me racist. .... you get the general photograph here.

[This is not to say that there were not some positives to the year. The teachers I worked with bent over backwards to help me and even gave up numerous sick days for me so that I could recover adequately from the thyroid surgery. There were also some very nice students that sometimes made me feel like a little bit less of an idiot ... fortunately.]

So...on days like today when it feels as if I am wearing the yoke of an ox on my shoulders due to the position in which I was forced to sleep with a fussy Julia burrowing into my armpit all night Simon asks,

"So...what do you have on your docket for the day?"

and after some thought I reply, "Well, I do need to go to the store to get an onion..."

and he waits for the rest of my plans and .... there aren't any....  maybe its bad but I don't really feel guilty at all.