New Year’s has never really meant that much to me… because, I suspect, New Year’s for me always hits in September.

This January stuff is nice for a few days off and a change of weather (btw, in Los Angeles, the temp dropped to a frigid 62 this week inspiring all of us in Southern California to declare WTF?), but my life is synced to an academic calendar more than it is to anything else. I guess that’s why when the ball drops in Times Square, I am not one of those people with poppers and funny hats ready to dance in the streets of New York.

The rest of the world may be thinking WELCOME 2010 but for me, I am usually more concerned with finishing what is already in motion. I need to get my students back into the saddle and up to speed as quickly as I can. And then I need to make hay because January is a good month for teaching.

February, of course is gonna blaze by — especially since there are holidays that will take away time from an already short month — and before I know it March, the biggest, most beefy teaching month of the year, will be here.

March, btw, is where we make our money. Have a good March and you will have made some real inroads. Have a poor March and you will look back on the year with “Oh, what coulda been.”

See, this is how I think. The year ends in June, begins in September and only muggles really dance in the streets in January — cause they do not understand the true nature of the universe’s actual schedule.

As much as I want to just chill on the Friday after Thanksgiving, I know that it really is in the best interests of my students to dedicate at least 45-90 minutes to school.

Why?

Because I need to make sure that the month of December ROCKS!

See, classroom minutes are precious and the fact of the matter is, it’s way too easy to allow December to slip away into a “we are almost at the Holiday Break” mode… and class can all-too-easily devolve into a space where we are somewhat just biding our time until Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer comes to town. I don’t want that. It’s bad for my kids. It’s bad for my classroom aspirations. It’s bad for our school and for our society. December represents an excellent opportunity to turn UP the heat (not to lighten up) — to bring our A game, to intellectually work at a double-time pace so that we squeeze whatever juice there is left in the fruit of 2009 to the max. It’s a mentality more of us ought to have. (New teachers, are you listening? You might have some terrible role models on campus who will give you the “countdown til they are “free” every day for the next month but don’t listen to them!).

I want my kids to end on a BANG! not on a “slide away”. Most solid teachers do.

The Friday after Thanksgiving is thus where I take stock and devise this “plan” to succeed. (Cause without a plan the chances of actually accomplishing this are small.

It’s funny, too, because I remember my first year as a teacher how I scheduled a big test for the day right before the holiday break — a HUGE test, one that would follow through on my belief that school is not over until it’s over — and everything I did in the month of December pointed directly to that one final Ka-Boom!

And then only about 43% of the class showed up the day before the break and it was 3 weeks before I could sort out what the heck had happened.

So now I know. December 18 (and 17th and even 16th) at my school is going to have low attendance. This means that out of 14 teaching days in the entire month, I really will only have about 11 or 12 instructional days before they are gone-zo for 2 1/2 weeks.

How will I make the most of these days?

With the plan I craft on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Though it’s nice to have the day off, it’s nicer to know that when I get back, we are gonna bring some heat before the big break.

T.S. Eliot was wrong — October is the cruelest month, not April — which he should have known because at one point he was a schoolteacher. And not too be too critical of a Nobel Prize winning poet, but I think if he would have really considered the plight of educators in the month of October, The Waste Land might have gone in a slightly different direction.

As almost all teachers know, October is the part of the marathon race that is every school year whereby the end is so far out of sight it’s not even worth looking out on the horizon for it. Yet, the bloom is completely off the rose in terms of the freshness of a new year having started so that any sense of a “honeymoon with the new kids” is long since blam-o! And any re-charging or the batteries that was done over the summer has long since seen its reserves tapped, as well.

There’s no holidays. There are no breaks. The days get shorter and cooler and wetter. (I mean I love the Fall, don’t get me wrong, but even the weather conspires against us a wee little bit.)

October is a long stretch of road.

On one hand though, October is a great month for me though because I get a heck of a lot of uniterrupted teaching time in. It’s where the path of the year gets deeply plowed. On the other hand, teachers like me endure small little things like incapacitating throat infections which would sideline most mere mortals and yet, since I barely have enough time to accomplish all the things I plan to tackle even when I’m healthy, I certainly do not feel I have the time to call in sick — and so, inevitably during the month of October, I trudge on in, up before the sun, looking like a teacher that should really be spending their day in bed with a bowl of chicken noodle soup, and I suck it up and work through the themes of Frost, figurative language of Maya Angelou or the mood of Poe knowing that the weekend is only another 5 days and 188 essays away.

And this week, for the extra added bonus, we have Halloween in the air. Now, personally, I simply LOVE Halloween. One of the most fun times of the year for me. However, just the idea of it being in the air makes the kids both restless and mischievous. And for the students on campus who are not the most “academically oriented kids in the first place” Halloween week is almost a green light for them to cause trouble.

Ask anyone on campus this week and what you’ll find is people who are feeling stretched, tired, and over-worked. Now personally, I am a fan of these things because education is like muscle building and sometimes you have to do the sweaty, hard, strenuous work that stretches all the sinews in order to make productive gains. On the other hand, it’s easy to advocate for this type of workout but hard to actually get in the gym and be the weightlifter who has to pull it off.

October challenges me as a teacher. It makes me reach down, it makes me work hard and it forces me to keep my eyes on the prize and not become distraught over the insane amount of work which needs to be done in an almost un-doable amount of time under quite unreasonable circumstances.

Yet, like the Maya Angelou I am teaching this week, Still I Rise.