One year
Yesterday, I submitted the grades for the last batch of students, the delinquents, in my summer classes, and with that I concluded my first year of teaching. I half-expected someone to come up to me, shake my hand, maybe congratulate me on a job well done and hand me a box of expensive cigars and a snifter of fine brandy. But I was alone in my faculty center room, and all I had was two, two-week old cigarettes that I had stashed in one of the drawers for such an occasion (running out of cigarettes in FC during a moment when I needed to smoke) and a half-empty bottle of drinking water. So I raised my left fist in the air, whispered a "hells yeah!" and I lit my stale cigarette and drank the tepid water to commemorate that moment.
* * *
Okay, perhaps I'm being overly dramatic and such. I was online and texting people yesterday after I submitted the grades.
* * *
Today, I spent most of the day cleaning out my netbook and then trying to come up with a syllabus for my Eng 10 class next semester, which up to this moment refuses to yield to me. In the background, the impeachment trial was winding down and people on both Facebook and Twitter were posting their witty, pithy comments. I wanted to join in, but really what do I have to say about this entire thing that doesn't make me look like an joke-cracking ass?
Nothing really. Nothing to say. So I bite my tongue and keep on working.
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The thing that they don't tell you about teaching is that it's a lonely job (Perhaps, girl_o_rama did mention something along these lines once, but I refused to hear it). I haven't spent so much time on my own as when I started teaching last June. I guess these are occupational hazards--the prepping, the checking, and, finally, the grading; these are things that require solitude, and it turns out that I have had that in spades last year.