Remembering 2006

June 14

There is no way to describe the joy and relief of finishing the school year. It has been a hard year – the first full-time teaching job – and I’ve heard that every first-year teacher feels this way. It truly is good to have company in misery – I am part of the “First-year Teachers Club” whose charter states up front that “first-year teaching sucks,” The interesting thing is to see the delight on the faces of the seasoned teachers as well at the thought of the school year ending, and to realize that everyone feels this ecstasy. Makes one wonder about a job that causes such elation when it comes to an end.

There is much to write about from this past school year, but it’s hard for me to re-hash it. Who want’s to think about the bad times of your life? So let me first think about the good times…
- Nick: my venting buddy who I knew would never breathe a word of anything I said if it was private. He was my personal 2nd-hand cook - he didn’t cook, but I enjoyed many meals prepared by his “man-servant” and many leftovers delivered to my door (thank you, Nick!).
- My students: the 11th grade class that I taught this year was fabulous. I loved almost all of them. The seniors were another story, but…I said this was about the good times.
- The teachers: there are some wonderful teachers. I just started to get to know the French teacher, Dania Charr from Lebanon, but she is moving to Jordon. I think we could have become good friends. Kimm Leeman, the P.E. teacher, was going to move back to Canada, but in the end they took a position at an Aramco school south of Khobar. The Woods were wonderful – very supportive when I felt like I was drowning. They are moving to China. We have about 5 Filipinos working in various capacities around the school and this has been fun for me. We reminisced about old Filipino TV ads recently and had a good laugh. Next year they promise to bring Filipino food to work for me. Yum. The truth is that I haven’t developed any close friendships with the teachers at my school, and haven’t spent the time it takes to form friendships outside of the school. Need to work on this next year.
- Yearbook – this falls under both good & bad categories. The seniors on the book were more often than not painful to deal with, but in the end, everyone loved the yearbook and gave it gushing praise. Felt very good.

Bad times…
- I’m a lousy teacher – I know it. Can’t deny it. Hopefully will do better next year.
- Some bad student experiences – the majority of the seniors in my Yearbook class sucked. There were a handful of good ones, but overall it was a painful group. Felt like it took half the year to get them to do anything. In the end, they worked, and I gave them credit for the book everyone praised, but it wouldn’t have happened without me. I averaged about 4 hours sleep a night for the month before deadline fixing all the thousands of mistakes and actually re-making many layouts from scratch. In the end, there were probably only 5 students I liked and will miss. Other “bad student” stories involve students who didn’t like their grade so sent their father to complain to the principal about me.
-gained weight from sitting on my butt grading papers or lesson planning every waking hour.
- my two school bags were stolen out of the back seat of a car with everything school related in it, including students’ unit tests and some major projects.

That’s it. I’m not going to think too much about it now for rest of the summer except for some nightmare teaching dreams I keep having.