Identity Crisis

It's Sunday night, so the typical emo-child mood is beginning to set in. Unfortunately, I left the power cord to my computer at school, leaving me to blog via Blackberry and severely hindering my output of semi-cliched and -depressing blabber. Maybe that's for the best.

I'm coming to the realization that what is so hard about this whole experience goes a lot deeper than it being TFA, or the first year teaching. It's about it being my first year out of college and not knowing who I am. For so long, I (along with most other people my age) considered myself a student. It's the first way I identified myself, whether I was identifying with the academic parts of being a student or the less academic parts. Now I don't know how to identify myself. It's like those restaurants that move into old Pizza Huts or IHOPs- it might say "Indian Sunrise Buffet" on the outside, but it doesn't seem to be fooling anyone.

That's about all you'll get out of me tonight because my thumbs are cramping up.

Weekend Getaway

Blogging from DC right now, in the car to go wedding dress shopping with my sister and the rest of the girls from my mom's college crew. Kristin is currently spouting out my list of duties as Maid of Honor as I ignore her to blog on my Blackberry. She's talking about the possibility of hyphenating her last name to Fiorillo-Baker, mostly so that my mom can still find her on the volleyball blogs (it's impossible to even think about people adjusting to name change). Personally I think she should combine them to make Fiorillobaker (pronounced Fee-or-ill-oh-bock-er). Anyway, time to critique her. More later.

Long Time Gone

Hectic hectic hectic.  That describes my life lately, in a word.  Or really, three words.  After my bout with strep last week, I jetted up to Hartford for a little Valentine's Day getaway, getting back with enough time to get a few hours of sleep before going back to school for hyper-serious planning Monday morning.  Then this weekend I have my family reunion vacay in DC, watching the little brother play in his first D1 lax game (STARTING against Hopkins... woo Jonny), meeting the future brother-in-law (be afraid Ryan), and having general fun with some good friends.

In good news, my wonderful roommate was voted First Year Teacher of the Year at her school, meaning I had an excuse to buy and decorate a 12 inch diameter cookie cake.  It was gone in a day.

 

It was gone after a day.

Boring post, hopefully I'll have a minute to breathe and actually write something worthwhile.

Germs...

I have some extra time on my hands since I got strep throat from one of my kids and am quarantined to my apartment.  This week has been crazy- I've had tons of trainings and meetings and commitments... probably why I got sick in the first place.

Tuesday was the 100th Day of School (woo!), so we got to have a little more fun than usual.  It was really cool to talk to my kids about how much smarter they had gotten in a hundred days and see how amped up they got about it (note: see picture below).

   

As much as missing school is a pain (I still had to drag my butt to school at 5:30 this morning to make sure my sub plans were taken care of), I really needed today to get stuff done.  We had a staff meeting yesterday which consisted of approximately an hour and a half of getting our hands slapped by the administration.  Because there are people not doing what they're supposed to, everyone has to turn in lesson plans at the end of the week for review, be ready for walk-throughs and unannounced observations, and generally just do more work to prove that we are meeting our principal's expectations.  After that, I knew what my kids feel like when I make them listen to me about how important it is to clean up the sight word station.  Not that the things didn't need to be said, necessarily, but I realized how much more effective it is to try to get people (or kids) to self-regulate.  If my classroom was self-regulated, I wouldn't have to be acting like the dictator of phonics letter tiles.  If our school was more self-regulated, we wouldn't have to have people checking up on us all the time.  I don't know how you get yourself into a place like that, but I wish I did.  Things would run a lot more smoothly, and maybe my kids would actually want to listen to me more.

So anyway, this week was pretty terrible timing, with all my obligations and my sickness and my new work expectations, all coming before I leave for New England to go see my boyfriend.  My flight doesn't even get back until waaay late Sunday night, because we were SUPPOSED to have a teacher workday on Monday.  Mother Nature, of course, ruined that for me with her snow day.  Actually, I guess it would be whoever is in charge of plowing in Charlotte that dropped the ball.  Oh well.  This day is good catch-up since I will not be doing any work this weekend.  Just relaxing and trying not to give strep throat to college kids.

Typical Sunday Blues

Actually, it's more like typical winter blues.  Even though there isn't any snow in Charlotte, it's cold and rainy and overall, pretty depressing weather.  Our last day off until Spring Break was last Monday, and now every teacher in CMS is look ahead to the rest of Februrary and March with feelings of panic and anxiety.  At least that's how I feel.  The idea of eight straight five-day weeks is daunting and overwhelming.  And, as usual, that feeling is hitting all at once on this Sunday morning.  Since I hadn't blogged in awhile, I thought I'd give it a try today in an effort to alleviate all of this stress I'm feeling thanks to our marathon school schedule in the upcoming months.

On Friday, I took a professional development day to go observe another teacher as a TFA requirement.  Since she teaches at a late start school and since I didn't have much use in seeing her teach social studies and take her kids to specials, I got to wake up almost a full five hours later than normal.  FIVE hours.  Insanity.  Being in her room really made me realize where I'm going wrong, but not in that freak-out, I-suck-at-everything way.  Every lesson she did was completely driven by her students, and she showed an amount of patience with them that I know I haven't had with my kids.  Hopefully I'll be able to put that in play when I go back tomorrow.

On Saturday, I went into school for a bit to try to fix up some of my small group stuff and had the luck to find out that I got another student, upping my class roster to a total of 23 students.  He was in another class at my school, so I'm assuming that he is getting moved because of behavior issues.  I think that might be another contributor to my level of stress today.

In reality, though, I think this awful mood is a result of my lack of a social life.  I feel like a different person than I was in college.  Missing out on a weekend in New York with a bunch of my friends and realizing how terrible I've been at keeping in touch is starting to get to me, especially when I live in this fun city where I don't do anything because all I think about is my classroom.  It's weird to see how much things change after you have to come out in "the real world" and I don't think it's a very easy thing to adjust to.  What I really want is to go back to a time when my friends and family were close by, when I was better at the things I needed to do, when I felt like I could easily break out of a bad mood simply by surrounding myself by the people and things I loved the most.  In the end, I think that's what's getting to me.  I think that's what gets to a lot of people when they start some new stage of their life- they're missing out on that comfort zone, the support network on which they always relied and sometimes took for granted.

This is kind of a depressing post, but hopefully something will happen over the course of the day that will let me get back on here and start being my usual hilarious self.

Quickie Before Bed

I loved yoga tonight.  It reminded me of my college volleyball workout... sort of.  Like a yoga-for-volleyball type thing, definitely something my coach would've made us do.  We did a lot of lunges and crunches and planks and stuff, things that are normally worked in there somewhere, but this felt different.  I kept waiting for someone to crack a joke, or have their arms slide out from under them in forearm planks, or begin giggle uncontrollably, probably because that was a typical day at practice.  The reason we were so good at abs was because we were laughing (and snorting, some of us) through it all.  And let me tell you, doing a plank while you're laughing is a hell of a lot harder than when you're not.  Factor in trying to keep your grip on a gym floor that hasn't been cleaned since before pre-season and you've got yourself quite the workout.

I miss that.