This is a new level of restlessness to which I am unaccustomed.
Nothing is more appealing to a teacher than the thought of summer vacation. It seems blissfully limitless, peaceful, restorative, and a slew of other adjectives that cannot be applied to the school year. For 10 months, summer was the somewhat seductive light at the end of a long, ugly tunnel. As unsettled (or rather, confused) as I felt last Friday, waving goodbye to busloads of children as they pulled away from school, I knew that I was about to embark on the best nine weeks of my short life.
I definitely didn’t think I’d already be bored.
Something weird happens when you go from 60 to 0 in mere seconds. Your body can’t quite adjust, or maybe it’s your mind. Here’s the list of things I have done to keep myself busy since May 25th, 1:06 PM
- Cleaned out a year’s worth of papers from junk mail to student work to crap I saved from Institute
- Baked cookies
- Gone to two different farmer’s markets
- Texted incessantly
- Gone to two different outdoor concerts
- Read on my balcony
- Helped paint a friend’s house
- Read in the park
- Run
- Walked to the grocery store/to my EOYC/to the coffee shop instead of driving
- Eaten a lot of FroYo
- Made appointments with doctors
- Cleaned the grout in my kitchen
- Watched a lot of TV of variable quality
- Draino’d every drain in my bathroom
- Eavesdropped involuntarily on incredibly loud neighborhood drama at 1 AM
And most terrifyingly, as of this morning…
17. Hauled out the new sixth grade textbooks and started breaking down long term plans, researching interactive notebooks, and sketching out hourly/weekly blocks for August.
If that is not a forewarning of insanity, I’m not sure what is. Last night a friend, who still has 9 instructional days left, had to stop me as I yammered on about teaching to ask me what the heck I was doing, I was free.
Oh well. I’ll start being a human again eventually.
