Wow...so it has been a year
...but this will not be the "Lemme recap everything thats happened in a year" entry. To give the short gist of it...Gary broke up with me in May of 2006, the pain and despair I was in threw the whole balance of my life off and I ended up spending my last semester in Gville partying too hard, focusing on just getting out of Gville, and being distraught even more over Gary. Because of these things, I lost sight of graduate school, hardly finished my thesis, and had no general idea of what I was going to do with my life. Not wanting to be stuck with no direction, I decided to apply to the NYC Teaching Fellows program and attempt to move to New York to become a teacher for students with special needs. Guess where I am at right now? Yes, New York. I got accepted into the program, and after working through the spring at a restaurant in the Keys and living with my parents, I saved enough money to move up here and live like a poor college person all over again. I began working about 5 or 6 weeks ago, with students arriving four weeks ago. Teaching has turned out to be so much more work than I thought it would be. I'm putting in 12 hour days and still never feel caught up with the work. I'm constantly exhausted because I haven't slept a full 8 hours in a night in weeks and I spend my weekends sitting on my ass in my apartment just relaxing and doing nothing and getting frustrated and worried because I'm not tending to the work that I should be.
In fact, here I am on Sunday evening with more shit to do than I even know and I can not settle my mind enough to do any of it. Everytime I attempt to look over lessons, or student's files, I get frustrated, upset, despondent even and throw it all down in exasperation. Am I cut out for this job? The last week was probably the worst week I have had so far, for multiple reasons. The first, I was sick/exhausted all week and never seemed to feel rested. On top of that, some of my co-teachers are making it seem as if I'm not doing enough work (yet I hardly ever have the foundations to work from) and at the same time they are cutting me entirely out of the classroom teaching environment by utilizing me as if I am a teacher's aide or paraprofessional. In fact, in one class, I had an experience where the subject teacher completely undermined my authority IN FRONT of the students. Half of the students already treat me and view me as not being the "real teacher" and it bugs me to no end. I'm there to help them, I give it my best (do I?) to make sure that they are understanding what is going on in class and I just never seem to get any respect from anyone.
For tomorrow I am supposed to establish "personalized plans" for each of my students but I don't really know what that means or what would be appropriate for each one. I guess I'm just frustrated as all hell and I really should just try and focus and get my work done. I can't help but have a wandering mind though...all I keep thinking is 'what if?' What if I hadn't gone through a rough break-up in a critical decision-making time in my life? What if I'd just stayed in the keys and worked my ass off more and more and lived at home all the time? What if I wasn't gay? What if I had focused on writing more? What if I get halfway through this life here and decide it is not for me? What if i don't even know what I'm saying right now? What if I just move back to the keys and work as a server in a restaurant for the rest of my life? What if I just stopped staring at the computer screen for now and got busy for the next hour of my life before I go to bed?
posted by RPF @ 5:16 PM
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