Christmas Exhaustion

The last two weeks of school were the hardest I've known in terms of finding motivation. Psychologically, I felt no desire to come in. It wasn't the children that I had a hard time with; it was everything else: BTSA, AB466 trainings, the meetings after classes, grading, following up on two irresponsible kids, the pile of paper that constantly gets shove in my box, copying, and trying to figure out how to teach a new curriculum every day.

In addition, I have my three exceptional students. One student is finally cleared to attend SDC, and a second who needs to go finally received her glasses. She has needed these glasses since September... but that's another issue. At least they came, and finally we can re-evaluate her abilities. My third, who entered illiterate and is now decoding letter-by-letter, is making noticeable progress.

On another front, I was caught in a curriculum tug-of-war between our principal, our bilingual coordinator, and my own judgment for a month. Our reading coach and our district bilingual liaison went to bat for my kids, but the prolonged stress and administrative flip-flops took a toll on my body. Last week, I broke out with shingles and one of the biggest cold sores I've ever had. Both viruses were dormant in my body, but when I became worn down mentally and physically, the symptoms flared up. Improper hydration was a factor, but by far the greater factor was work-related stress.

Teaching is not worth the money. That's not a complaint - it's a fact. The price your body and mind pay to function under the "reasonable" requirements of a NCLB highly qualified educator are brutal. It's no wonder the state has a 50% turnover rate in the first five years. I expect it will go higher the further we move into Program Improvement status as a state - unless, of course, incentives to new/continuing teachers include removing or streamlining "supportive" programs such as BTSA and AB466. Most of that material is dead weight. We new teachers succeed in spite of these programs, not because of them. I am grateful for the chance to develop professionally, but not at the cost of my classroom organization.

The main thing is not the main thing with many of these requirements. The main thing is relationship, yet I feel so consumed by paper shuffling that my relationships suffer. My goal is to survive this final year of BTSA, finish all AB466 math requirements, and move beyond probationary status as a new teacher. I feel if I can stay at the same grade level next year (third grade), next year will be a fruitful year for relationships. As it stands, I feel I am still lingering on the outskirts of surviving. I want to move beyond that to the joy of teaching, but in so many ways I feel the weight of other people's good intentions bearing down on my shoulders. It is difficult to move forward under the weight of overloaded expectations... and for the second year in a row, I feel a bitterness and resentment toward those who cause teachers, especially new teachers, to pay the price for their overly simplistic good intentions. Something that was supposed to be beautiful and organic has become a regimen of right angles, as though in controlling us with legislative requirements they could hold back the tide of darkness that descends on education. That darkness is isolation, and it affects us all. It is the isolation that exhausts me, the strain of trying to understand the thoughts of those who I've never met yet have the power to say, "You don't know what you're doing after eleven years of college work, so take more training." It is this pressure that pushes me farther and farther down a hallway of locked doors, farther from my students, my peers and my colleagues. This driving force has been dubbed progress by some, yet in my dreams at night I know it by another name: control.