I finally mustered the bravery and courage this morning to look at the rosters of my upcoming school year, a symbolic moment of every August, that day I officially end the oft-quoted by non-teacher narrative of living the “Oh, you’re so lucky you’re a teacher because you get summers off to lie about swimming pools in exotic locations sipping cocktails and enjoying bonbons while young men fan and feed you grapes” dream bullshit, which, in reality, really only amounts to a few weeks of sleeping in until six am, cobbled haphazardly between week-long Zoom presentations about the engaging and valuable new state department requirements for maintaining teacher licensure, unending trainings on the expectation of implementing not one but two new reading computer programs that require 60 minutes each daily of usage by students who only have 48 minutes in a class period and Chromebooks with missing keys and cracked screens and shitty if even functional wifi, and surrender my infinite days of luxury, which equates to my human ability to hydrate, lunch, socialize, think, breathe, and pee on my own schedule and instead begin to take the mental and emotional baby steps necessary to convince myself that I happily endured 8 years of college and earned three degrees to get the right to create fun lessons on such mundane topics as why we don’t stick pencils in our noses and why capital letters and periods are important in sentences (the latter to keep us from passing out, because they stop our reading to make us pause and breathe and think).

Clearly I need to revisit that second lesson sooner rather than later. Sorry. It appears I am not as ready for a first-period class of 18 eleven year old, non-English speakers as I thought. Do I still have time for a bonbon to mull this over?