Interesting

When I first started at my school, I was hired literally two days before school started. The teachers were well into the first workweek, and I was hired on a Wed. and then arrived on Thursday...catch: I had no idea where the school even was, much less what neighborhood it was in. Thank goodness my friend had told me it was a good school...and thank goodness B was hired on the same day as I. What is interesting is that on the day we were supposed to have our Meet and Greet, where my students comes to meet me, a tropical storm came in and flooded the whole city. The schools were closed and so I did not meet or greet my students. Looking back, I believe if I had I wouldn't have stayed at the school. 

I can usually size a kid up pretty quickly, and since a few of my students from that year came back to see me  today I was instantly reminded of the dysfunction in that group. I remember the numerous reports to child services, the insanity of one student who smeared his feces on the bathroom walls with regularity, the child who ripped a soap dispenser off the wall of the boys' bathroom and regularly attempted to cheat on all of his work (I caught him, and one time I actually Googled his phrases from an essay and found the sources of each sentence he had plagiarized), and the list goes on. I remembered thinking that all I had to do was just get through each day, and eventually it would end, and I could only hope that the next year would be better. There were days when I literally wanted to walk out of the building and just quit. The only problem was that I did care about them. I couldn't just pick up and leave. Besides, most of them were used to people leaving them in some way and I would not give any one the satisfaction of leaving. If I had met them on that first day though, I wouldn't have come back.

So I am now beginning my third year at the school, and although the fear of that first year still remains within me, especially when I see those students from that class, I am so happy I stuck it out. They always say that when you go through a year like that, stick it out. The odd thing is that when I went through it, I didn't think it was all that bad. But then I got my next class and I realized how bad it was. This year I am excited and I can't wait to get going with them.