ARRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!

After an exhausting week I have learned some things about my new school. I have learned that not just one but two fights can break out in the same classroom in one day. I have learned that it takes time after the summer to develop the muscles that are required to stand for 9 hours a day again. I have learned that without those muscles that I want to cut off my feet and boil them until there’s only bone left. I have learned that I miss my old students and I wish I could see their smiling faces in my room again. So many of them became like an extended family for me during the day. They were my daytime children... or more like my nieces and nephews because I wasn’t able to really discipline them like a parent. I couldn’t hug them like a parent - though I wanted to when they were sad or did really well. I know I probably got too close to them and I hope to do better this year with maintaining my professional distance, but they were such cool and funny people with interesting lives. During the course of this week, I have learned most of all that I am really out of practice but it comes back like riding a bike. I was afraid over the past few weeks that I would not remember how to teach and I’d be terrible.
Also, just for a daily moment of humor - my mother and step-father came to my school to bring me the skeleton that I liberated from my last school. My step-father took the time to clean him and fix him for me and my mother put a tie and baseball cap on him. They got stopped at the gate when they were bringing me my skeleton and the poor guard on duty didn’t know what to do with the two people bringing what appeared to be a dead body seat-belted in their car into my classroom. My mother forgot to mention to said guard that the skeleton was a replica and not real.