not webcomic worthy.
I'm having an I-Hate-Teaching Week. It's a little early in the year for a week like this, and that troubles me a little. The good news is that when I feel disillusioned with my job, I write like a fiend. It's almost like, every Monday, I choose whether I'm going to be more dedicated to writing or to teaching that week. This week, I wrote about 6,000 words, leaving me at about 58,000 out of 80,000 words. So that's a nice number to look at.
I almost hope that I hate my job for the next month, because at this rate, I'll finally have a finished novel to edit by Christmas. I imagine that editing (and I don't mean proofreading - I mean rewriting, rearranging, reworking huge pieces of text) will take me quite a few months. It's not even that I'm sick of writing it. It's that I've been at Step One: Writing this Fucker for almost exactly two years now, and I'm ready to jump on up to Step Two: Realizing That Half of this Fucker is Crap and Rewriting It. That way I can head to Step Three: Sending This Fucker to People and Waiting in Bed, Terrified, for Critiques to return, and finally finish it all off with Step Four: Receiving 100 Rejection Letters for Queried Literary Agents so that I can go back to Step One with a new plan.
Luckily, I know that my next novel will have to be a scathing satire of the American education system, so at least I've got a Plan B.
One thing that I've found is that what authors say about novels writing themselves is surprisingly true. Sometimes you've got stuff all planned out, and you find yourself writing something completely unexpected. In a way, I'm excited to finish, because I want to see where it wants to go. I've never finished anything this big.
So, back to me hating teaching. Let me begin by stating that last year, I was told by every teacher in the middle school that my incoming class would be a nightmare - the kids were low on skills, there was little to no parent contact, there were lots of discipline issues, and the kids were generally uninspired learners. That, right there, is what I hate about education - this incoming class is, by far, my favorite class. They are a bunch of misfit loser kids, and they're also the weirdest, quirkiest, most refreshing batch of students I've had.
Someone at lunch today said that she preferred teaching 5th graders because 8th graders had bad attitudes. I told her that the bad attitudes are what I love about 8th graders. I think I have a bad attitude. If you're in 8th grade, and you have a good attitude about life, there's probably something wrong with you. .
So that pretty much sums up why I hate teaching this week. I'm the misfit in a school full of conformist (never thought I'd use that word after high school), uninspired women whose only goal in life is to buy shoes, churn out babies, and talk about their husbands, and I relate much better to my maladjusted students than I do to any of the adults.
What I'm saying is that I'm pretty much back in middle school again. Time to break out the JNCO jeans and the XXL tshirts.
Oh, and, I won $100 to WalMart to spend in my classroom, so I'm buying a digital camcorder. To convince my principal that this was an excellent purchase, I sent her a list of 15 things I'm going to do with it when I get it. Then in the morning, when I asked her if she read it, she said, in the nicest way possible, "Yeah, so I was reading it, but then I had these other, actually important things to read?" So I guess something still lit a spark of educational giddiness in me. I just wish I had someone to share it with.