I am a first year teacher.
I am emotionally and physically exhausted. I want to yell and rage and hit, and I have never hit anyone before in my life.
I want to swear and break anything and sleep for weeks.
I honestly love my job some days. I love teaching, I really do, and its the only job I've ever had where boredom has not been an issue but some days....
Today was just a really bad day.
I student taught in a southern urban area with kids from all walks of life. I had some students who wore Prada and designer outfits that mommy and daddy bought, and I had a 17 year old married mother of three. A finished student teaching in December and went north where I accepted a job at a private catholic high school.
I have never met so many arrogant assholes in my life. They swear, they hit, they have a higher population of drug users than any of them are willing to admit, and they know that they can get out of anything. Some of my students pay upwards of $5,000 a year for tuition, and they grew up in households where any mess can get cleaned with money.
I walked into a class that was without discipline, and I have been fighting for it ever since. I send them to the office, I give detentions, I give extra work, I call parents. They are unresponsive. Some days I begin to think that if punching a student could keep the entire class quiet for 20 minutes that I would be willing to do that.
The other day I gave a student detention for putting another kid's book in the ceiling and he could not figure out why i gave him detention. Another student got himself stuck between cross bars in a desk and refused to go down to the office because he "did nothing wrong". He then let loose a stream of curses and complained when I gave him detention.
I know that Monday holds bright possibilities, and I have so far been good about being positive at the start of each day, but I understand things now that I never could before.
I never understood those overbearing hard-as-nails teachers who ran their class with an iron fist. I never understood bitter worn out teachers, or those substitute teachers who would burst into tears.
I understand now because today I feel broken and beaten and the idea of seeing those kids again makes me want to destroy them or myself or maybe both. The really frustrating part is that I truly do just want them to learn. I actually had a student tell me that I had taught more in one month of being at the school than the past teacher had in six months, so if he had been paying attention he would have learned a lot. Somehow, that is just not comforting.
As much as I would love to just quit or leave or run away, I know that I will go back on Monday because I am not ready to give up yet. I am still trying and still fighting and hoping that maybe I can change something, even a little bit. I wonder sometimes if I should be applying for teaching jobs for next year because at the moment I just keep asking myself whether or not this job is worth loosing my sanity, my serenity, and sometimes my hope.