I Lied.

Okay, so remember way back to a month ago, when I promised that I would be posting again soon? Well, "soon," it turns out, is a relative term.

The first five weeks of school have simultaneously flown by and dragged on. Noteworthy incidents include:

• A student cutting his own hair on the third day of school;
• Vomit (luckily into a trash can, but it was a close one);
• Finding out that one of my students knew literally ZERO English (and of course, I knew ever-so-slightly-more-than-ZERO Spanish);
• One student cussing out another student (who had told the first student that his hair looked like noodles);
• Two nosebleeds from two separate students on the same day (unrelated...I think);
• A decidedly failed experiment in which my students chose their own seats;
• And countless technical difficulties.

To sum it up, a rather eventful first month.

To say that I am tired would be a vast understatement. To say that I am frazzled would be an understatement of mythical proportions.

I mean, I knew that the first year of teaching would be tough, to say the least, but....the metaphor that I'm using at the moment is that I am just barely treading water. My head frequently dips below the surface, I feel like I'm drowning, and I'm going literally nowhere but somehow I'm still floating.

Too much negativity? I concur. I just had to get that off my chest.

And now for what I love about my job:

• The hugs that I started getting from my students on the second day of school.
• Math. (I hated it as a student, but I LOVE teaching it!)
• Writing positive post-it notes to my students (on a semi-regular basis) and watching their faces light up when they read them first thing in the morning.
• Posting teaching memes in the faculty bathroom. (And only one other person knows that it's me doing it...heeheehee.) This one got the most laughs:

• My classroom. It's chaotic, but it's my own personal disaster zone.
• STAR time (Students and Teachers All Reading) at the end of the day. I'm reading my class Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and even though it feels like nobody is listening sometimes, they always ask me at the end of each day whether we're reading Harry Potter today. 😊 Now if I could just get them as excited about the stuff in the curriculum, we'd be in business.

Anyway. That's it for now. It's about 3 hours past when I wanted to be in bed. Just wanted to let y'all know that I'm still alive.

Ish.