Excuses, Apologies, and Teaching

When I was a sophomore in college, I took a career development class. It was supposed to help me figure out what I wanted to do with my life, though I couldn't have been more lost at the age of 19. The class was mostly a waste of time, but I have remembered one thing from it. We had to take all of these personality quizzes, and one of them assessed whether you are an introvert or an extrovert. But they didn't follow the traditional definitions of these words - introverts are shy and extroverts are outgoing. Instead they said that introverts are people who get energy from themselves; extroverts get their energy from other people. In other words, it's not that introverts don't like being around people, but they feel completely depleted after it. I measured just slightly over on the introvert side.

I mention this now only as an excuse for my absence from writing. Teaching is sucking every bit of energy out of me - physical and mental - and I find myself actually working around the clock. The urge to write is simply not coming to me like it used to, when there would be days when I was just DYING to get to a computer and pour out some story.

Nevertheless, I do not intend to give up on the blog!

All is well here in Warsaw. It is Sunday morning, and I'm holed up in my little apartment here in the city center. It is a studio apartment (meaning there is just one room, a bathroom, and a little kitchen nook), but the location is perfect, the building has a ton of character, and the apartment itself is clean and modern. It's taken me two months to make the apartment feel somewhat homey, but it's quite comfortable now. It doesn't have everything a girl could want, but it does have everything I need, and I'm living much more minimally these days than I was two years ago.

Every morning I walk out my front door between 7:00 and 7:30 AM and walk five minutes to the bus stop. My bus, the 180, takes about 25 minutes, depending on traffic. The commute doesn't bother me at all (assuming I can get a seat), and it's fairly direct and easy. Many people I know have to switch buses several times, so I feel very lucky! The transit system here is very smart. You can buy a thirty day card that allows you unlimited access to the subway, train, and bus systems, and you don't have to do any swiping or anything when you first board. I thought this was quite weird at first and that people were probably riding for free all the time, but they do have these monitors who board the bus randomly and check everyone's pass. The great thing about this system is that you don't have to wait for every single person to pay at the front of the bus before you can leave the stop. You just get on and go. It's great.

I'm required to teach a total of 25 lessons per week - two classes of 6th grade English language, two classes of 7th grade language, two classes of 7th grade literature, one class of 8th grade language, and one class of 8th grade literature. I don't know if that sounds like a lot to you, but it is a lot. Most days I teach five classes, and my free lessons are spent planning or grading. There's never a moment when I'm just sitting around, reading a book or surfing the internet.

I know you've all heard that teachers work so hard and blah blah blah, but I'm going to tell you again because I do have a feeling that most people STILL think that teachers somehow have it easier because the school day technically ends at 3 PM, and we have so many holidays. I find that most days I wake up at 6 AM and spend at least 30 minutes, if not more, working before my classes begin. Some days I stay after school for an hour to try to get a few things done, but every day, I find myself working away in the evenings. Compared to the days at my old job when I would work from 8 AM to 8 PM, I find this more tiring. It's active work. You cannot decide to just take a break and spend twenty minutes emailing or checking Facebook. And you have to be on top of your shit all the time! Otherwise, you are going to find yourself standing sheepishly in front of a group of expectant 13 year olds and have to figure out on your feet what to do with them for 45 minutes!

Okay, enough about that. It's hard work.

And yet! I am truly liking it. I know everyone says they like their new job after they've started it, but I do like it. I read somewhere (probably in Melissa's teaching book) that teaching is the hardest job you'll ever love. And I do think there's some truth to that. I adore my students (at least 90% of them, and that's including some pretty naughty ones). I thought that I wanted to teach because I wanted to enlighten these kids and help them to love learning and reading and writing, but I find that what I am most loving about my job is the kids themselves. And loving your kids is pretty much essential if you are going to like your job at all.

I think it's also important, though, that the kids like me. I was torn at the beginning of the school year. Do I act tough and mean and try not care whether the students like me? Or do I try to get them to like me? It obviously has to be a combination of the two. You have to be able to get them to do work, but I do think it is important that they like you - at least with this age group. I cannot recall a single teacher during elementary/middle/high school that I didn't like but learned a lot from. The teachers I remember as being GREAT teachers were teachers that I liked. Teachers that talked to me like an adult. I think as a middle school teacher, your job is as much to teach them as it is to be an approachable adult figure in their life.

So for the most part, I think my student like Ms. Bucy. They all say, "Good morning, Ms. Bucy!" when they see me in the halls, which is, well, charming. It makes me feel so giddy to walk through the school and hear that.

Though I am liking my job, I can't say for sure if I am good at it yet. I arrived two weeks before school started, was told that I'd be teaching 6th, 7th, and 8th grade English, and was basically given no curriculum to follow. We have a textbook to plod through in 6th and 8th grade, and I know which books I am supposed to teach for literature, but I feel like I've been given free reign with what I actually teach. I suppose many teachers would love that much freedom, but in my first year, I'd really rather have someone telling me what to do. I'd really rather not have to write an entire 7th grade English Languge curriculum all by myself. And I obviously haven't had the time to write such a curriculum anyway. So I find myself doing a lot of what I learned NOT to do at Teachers College, which is planning lesson to lesson. I have had many successful lessons, so far, but I do find that I lack a clear idea of what the "bigger picture" is. It's not a great feeling. But the planning gets easier with every week, and now that I've got the first quarter under my belt, I think I have a better sense of exactly what I'm supposed to be doing with the kids and exactly what I can expect out of the kids. My task is much clearer to me than it was 8 weeks ago. It's a shame because I feel like I will have finally gotten the hang of this in June, when the year is over! Always next year!

On the personal side, life is good and getting better. I cannot say enough nice things about my fellow teachers at the school, and I've made a few outside-of-work friendships with them. My newest friend is Analisa, a 24 year old girl from Boston. She did her undergrad at Columbia, so we were actually there at the same time, and we have this bizarre list of things in common. At any rate, we clicked from day one, and I am so grateful to have met her (not to get sappy on you). As soon as Bjorn left, I felt this huge hole in my life - one that my girlfriends used to fill. And after being abroad for a while, and finding everyone so different from you, it's amazing how comforting it is to find someone that is so much the same as you. Yay Analisa. So we've been going to some yoga classes together and going running and whatnot - the things that make you feel like you have a life outside of your job! Analisa, by the way, has just started her third year at the school. She found herself making the move to Poland because her Spanish boyfriend (who she met in Spain) took a job here.

And Bjorn is great. The long-distancing isn't ideal, but I do think that it's going as smoothly as it could go. We see each other every 2-4 weeks, which is not bad! He is doing very well in his program at school, and I am going to go up to Gothenburg in a week for my fall break, so I will finally get to see everything! (He always has to come here, since I have no time off!)

So yes, tomorrow is the start of my last week before fall break, a whole wonderful week off! After fall break, there will be just a short six weeks til...Bjorn and I come to Nashville for Christmas! Yay! We are so excited.

Okay. That's my update. I will write more. I really will. I am just beginning to get my head above water after two months of drowning, so I am hopeful that I will be able to manage my time better in the coming months.

Hope everyone is well. Much love.