I suppose it's time to talk about the hashtag I've created to document the amount of paper I, as a special education teacher in the New York City Department of Education, scrounge for, accumulate, and have to print on a daily basis in order to survive a typical work day.
#ImNotATeacherImATextbookMaker is meant to point out that with the incredible amounts of time, energy, and brain power it takes to create the curriculum, classwork, and homework meant to reinforce what you teach everyday in your classroom, how can teachers focus on doing their best teaching?!
It's like having a recipe for chicken pot pie that you have to prepare for the president in two hours, but none of the ingredients to do so. So you rush to the store, scrounge for as many ingredients you can in the small amount of time you have, and quickly scan the recipe so you can make something...SOMETHING!...relatively edible, because there's just no humanly possible way you could make a dish in that amount time be what it's supposed to be without the initial ingredients at your disposal. That is our current education system.
There is something dangerously wrong with this. If teachers don't know what's going on and feel insecure about what they enter their day with, then their students willl suffer. If the curriculum doesn't make sense to us teachers, how can we make it comprehensible to our students?
Bottom line: time is money and do you know how many unpaid hours I spend textbook-making?
I didn't sign up for this.
What keeps me going is knowing that this all-consuming paper-portion of my life has an end date.
It is finite.
I will NOT being doing this maddening work in 20 years. I will NOT be doing this soul-stifling work in 10 years. I will NOT be doing this work next year. Teaching Textbook-making is not for me. (I think I've said that before.) Neither is force-feeding ridiculous "common core" down my students throats, or preparing them in vain for a test high schoolers would have trouble with.
"Did you ever wish you could freeze frame a moment in your day, look at it and say 'This is not my life'?" --Daniel in Mrs. Doubtfire
I don't know how I'm going to make through to June 26th, but I'm really going to try and push through, and do my best. That way, nobody could tell me different. I gave all of myself -- in spite of myself -- to these ten kiddos, and then I'm saying "Goodbye, and Good Night!" "That's all, folks!" ...and I'm tap-dancing out of this job.
Moving on. Moving forward.
That's all for today.
On a MUCH brighter note,
my grams is coming in tomorrow
and staying the weekend.
It's going to be completely fabulous!
...and it will certainly
MAKE JANUARY AWESOME.
xOxO,
