Summer vacation has started and while I am not at school it doesn’t really yet feel like summer vakay.

But it will. (I am determined to make that happen.)

However, right now it just feels like I have a Monday off… but one where I am looking over my shoulder waiting for someone to say to me, “Back to the Salt Mines, Buster! And this time, we’re doubling the importance of the bubble tests!”

Irrational fears always surface when you are coming down off of such a long bender of bubble test mania, no?

Truth is, it usually takes me a bit to detox. I am still all-too-wrapped-up in the stuff I was wrapped up in for the past 10 months when the truth is, those 10 months are now over and I have 2 months to prepare for the 10 months that will follow (you know, the time when Fall will rear its never-ending, marathon-esque head).

Summer, however, is a time to break out of some patterns, reflect on some of the directions I want to take, grab a bit of more human-like sleep, eat some good food, indulge in some oh-so-awesome family time, and try to regain a sense of balance in life.

Cause when you are a teacher, you lose those. From sleep to diet, stress level to family time, being a teacher takes a lot from a lot of different parts of your life in a lot of different ways.

A good novel always helps as well. I’ve currently got 8 books sitting by my bed, 3 in my iPad, and still it feels as if I don’t have anything to read.

Don’t ya just hate that?

Indeed, I will be writing a new book. (Actually, I am working on two of them at the same time right now… while doing some copyedits on two others and cranking out more BookJams… but such is my professional writing life and this is what I love so I ain’t complaining at all.) And when I look at the schedule ahead, I realize how busy my summer schedule actually is.

But in feeling this “to do” pressure (you know, the kind where you spend a lot of time thinking about all your “to do” lists) I am reminded of something I once heard a cruise ship tour guide tell me. (FYI, yes, I love cruises. Matter of fact, might I propose an ECN ning cruise right now? We can take over an entire boat to the Mediterranean and go visit Greece before it defaults on its loans and gets sealed off and turned into a debtor’s prison. Anyway, the cruise guy said to me…)

“You tourist folks come in on Mondays tense about your dinner reservations and walking around with all your agendas… then by Thursday, you don’t give a damn about anything more minor than our captain hitting icebergs. Happens every time we set sail.”

That’s kind of me right now. I start off summer tense and knotted and in the world of “to do” and then in three weeks I am Mr. Friendly neighbor having impromptu Tuesday night bbq’s.

The school year has a cycle… but so does summer vakay: tension followed by a release of tension.

Let that journey begin!

On Monday we had a department-wide staff meeting in my room and I felt the need to apologize to everyone. Why? Because the week prior I was feeling salty and frustrated and aggravated at having been asked by our administration to lead our ELA department out of the bowels of NCLB hell (I’m not even the Department Chair) and during the course of doing some internal, department wide PD I was doing, I was kinda blunt.

I was brusque.

Indeed, I was chippy.

And usually, that’s not me. But damn, my buttons were pushed.

I should know better though. I mean face it, in a way, teachers can be the absolute WORST audience for other teachers to teach. Every rule they have in their own room is a room is a rule they feel they can break when someone else is at the front board. They talk when they feel like it, take phone calls when they feel like it, and already know the answers to all the questions even before the questions are asked.

Forget about the tardiness factor. Sheesh… just show up whenever the heck you want, why don’t you?

And when you dare to suggest that they might in some, slight way be acting hypocritical for this behavior — even if you are right, you are wrong. Ya can’t win for losing.

Like I said… Sheesh!

This is why I have no real ambition to be an administrator. Wrangling teachers is like herding cats and sometimes, when the screws of NCLB are being turned and the district offices (and front offices) are looking to you to make academic magic occur on a data-driven level, it becomes exhaustive.

Give me kids any day of the week. I mean I do PD because 1) I can and 2) because I believe I have something worth offering. No magic bullets, but some good, sound tools that can help classroom teachers improve their own classroom practice while simultaneously taking more joy and positive, fulfilling, meaningful efficacy from the work of being a teacher. I do PD with a win/win mentality in mind.

But I work with kids because I love it. That’s where the soulful stuff is for me… and that makes all the difference between this being a job and this being my life’s work.

Working with adults in a school system — sometimes it’ll drive ya bonkers. I just don’t know why I can’t seem to remember that more often.

Yep, gimme kids any day of the week.

Let’s be honest… it’s really hard to give a damn about a kid’s grades when a kid doesn’t give a damn themself.

I know I am supposed to be mature, compassionate, professional and perpetually hopeful and encouraging but wow, sometimes it is just so hard when you are being asked to care about the performance of a student at a level that exceeds their own concern. I mean after having just done grades and participating in a school-wide dialogue about “low performing students”, I feel like very few people want to acknowledge a hard truth about being a teacher in this day and age.

We are being asked to care at a level that exceeds the caring shown by 1) the student themself and 2) a host of “other” adults in many of these students’ lives.

I think we all know what I mean when I say that it’s supremely challenging to care about a kid’s grade when they themselves couldn’t give a flying fudgesicle about their own academic performance. This aspect of our job is almost self-explanatory.

But who else is supposed to care… besides me?

To the administrators and the district, every F I give is more a piece of data than it is a real kid. Same with the politicians and such. I mean they know there are real faces behind the grades — and they pay lip service to the idea that these are real people — but at the end of the day, they see trends and charts and graphs and data much more than they see real people.

And the way that they are slashing budgets and cutting services and resources and programs and personnel (and on and on and on, geesh, what aren’t they cutting nowadays?) it’s hard for me to buy into the idea that many of these folks really care about kids the way I believe they ought — or care about them more than I do.

What about the parents? (I am not even going to go there right now because it’s a can of worms that I don’t even know how to properly address. Just SO complicated.)

Now some teachers relish giving the F, as if it’s their own little revenge on a semester filled with grief and aggravation. “Ha!” they think. “You may have tortured me, but with this F, I get to throw a wee bit of gunk into your future karma… SO TAKE THAT YOU LITTLE PUNK!”

Other teachers feel sadness about giving an F to a kid that demonstrates no concern for their own academic well-being. They give F’s with a, “This F is gonna cook you in a way that you don’t even realize and I hate to do it but you’ve boxed me in — there’s no other way.”

And then, once you have been doing this long enough, you hear about how as a teacher, you shouldn’t take it home with you. How it is just part of the gig. It’s part and parcel. You learn the Q-TIP principal.

Quit
Taking
It
Personally

Well, I am still waiting for the point in my career when that actually happens. And when it does, isn’t that also a signal it might be time to leave the classroom?

Like most folks, I struggle with many matters of the teaching spirit. Sometimes I like to think it’s because I am an urban educator and things are especially rough in so many ways on the kids, teachers, administrators, parents and so on in communities like the one where I work. Then, when I travel and speak and talk and listen, I realize, what we do is hard… it’s hard all over no matter where you work and what you seek to accomplish.

It’s that simple. The issues revolving around American education are complex, unwieldy, illogical, and even blatantly absurd. But without a positive outlook, a hopeful spirit, a daily feeding of what’s good and right and worthy and noble about what we do and the direction we are headed, it becomes all too easy to slip into the quicksand of educational negativity. Some people spend their whole careers in this pit. Me, I refuse to. This is why I recognize that my greatest battle is often the battle against cynicism because if I am jaded and hopeless and negative and defeatist then there really is no way that I can see that I can be the best teacher I want/need/hope to be for my kids… because that stuff is both toxic and contagious.

Ultimately, being a teacher is hard. Being a good teacher is harder and being an exceptional teacher requires a sweating of the soul. This is not to say I am an exceptional teacher; this is only to say that I aspire to be one. And if I do, I believe that having hope, being positive, and remaining optimistic is an integral ingredient. Am I Pollyannish? People have accused me of being so. Then again, if I don’t believe I can make a real difference, then why should I believe that anyone else can make one? And conversely, if I do believe that I can make a difference, why shouldn’t I believe that others can as well.

But oh, sometimes it is really, really tough. And some days, the wolves howl with extra spit and venom at my door.