What Do I Want To Be When I Grow Up?

All I do anymore is tell stories about "my kids." Yes, I have become one of those lame ladies who don't have lives outside of their students, but at Institute that's all you really have to hold onto. You spend 20 hours a day cursingTFA because you only get 3 hours of sleep, but it's all so you can spend that 1 hour a day in the classroom.

I don't think my kids really know what to think about all of the 20-somethings that invaded their schools half-way through the summer (one of them invited me to "the club"), but to tell the truth, we don't really know what to think of them either. All night long, I go through my class roster in my head and think about all of them: what's worked for them, what hasn't, who I fought with, who I connected with, who I am getting through to and who is just pushing me away. It's scary that even though I am severely sleep deprived, I have to take sleeping pills to fall asleep because I can't stop thinking about what I need to be doing better. Something just isn't clicking. I am not a very good teacher. There must be something I can do better. After two weeks of teaching, mostly I have a running list of "what not to do" once I start again in my region. I have to dig very deep to try to find things to hold onto so I don't pack up my bag and call it quits.

Even though I don't think I am doing what I need to be doing, I can't stop caring. I guess that's why my suitcases are still empty. Today I watched 7 faces drop as they found out that the other 10 kids in our class would be passing onto the 8th grade and they would not. It almost broke my heart. I have to keep on teaching those 7 kids for the next two weeks to see if I can get them to pass, but the other 10 get to go home. I gave my e-mail address to one girl who swears adamantly that she wants to be a lawyer. She spells lawyer like "law," July like "glie," and career like "cerre," but I am going to get that girl to law school.