Teaching

I have three more Saturdays to go with my teaching/test prep job.

I am so over it. Have been for at least a month.

When it's time to prepare the vocab quizzes (which everyone fails anyway), I HATE it. I hate it. I don't want to do it and I'm irritated and a little angry that I have to. I don't know why.

Maybe I'm just out of the habit of teaching preparation? Maybe I just hate it because I'm at home and I feel like I shouldn't have to lesson plan at home. I know that sounds wrong, but remember that I would spend many hours at school doing prep so that for the two hours I was at home before bed, I wouldn't do more schoolwork.

Maybe it's just because it feels pointless. Perhaps because it's a short term thing and I don't feel super invested.

Don't get me wrong--I don't hate the kids or the actual teaching that takes place on Saturdays. The first group I have, the older and smaller group, is lovely and I would teach them all day long. The second group, which is larger, younger, and much more rambunctious, is trying but nowhere near the discipline problems I've faced in the past six years of regular classroom teaching. There are between two and four boys who do not stop moving or talking or writing inappropriate things (but relatively tame inappropriate--normal little boy inappropriate goofy stuff), and at least one boy who does absolutely NOTHING, and one to two girls who just write random answers in their work.

Overall, it's tiring in a way, but I don't leave defeated. Quite the opposite; I often feel energized, strangely. Like when I used to have those days where I taught six periods in a row. I got in the groove and all hyped up on adrenaline.

(By the by, I think there's a key difference between teaching six periods and being done before 3pm, and being in a classroom for seven straight hours and then still there for another three or four. That's the difference between a)middle school and elementary school and b)public school and charter schools. God. I'm tired just thinking about it all.)

Anyway, I have to go make up these pointless vocab quizzes now. Which the students will all fail. This school gives teachers the words they want tested, which usually are weird, irrelevant (notable examples include an eradicated disease and a not-famous European city), or too advanced. I am cranky because these kids don't need to pretend to know these words; they need high-frequency words at their level, like adjectives and verbs that take their vocabulary past "pretty" and "courageous." Have I said yet that this is pointless for all parties involved?

Gah. Now I've gotten myself all irritated again AND I still have to go do the things. Dammit.