Sunday night is not easy like Sunday morning. Sunday morning, you sleep in and relish it, knowing it's the last day you can sleep in for the following 5 days. You may reflect upon what you did the night before. You may try to think back to Friday, and it (along with work/school) may seem so very distant. You can't even remember what it's like to work.
Sunday night, right when the sun sets, is when the theme "song" to 60 Minutes haunts me with memories of my tightening chest as I faced a weekend's worth of neglected homework. My mom would be blithely learning about the S-n-L scandal or Iran-Contra affair while she heated up the corn chowder my grandma had sent home with my dad when he took her trash to the dump, and I would be having a coronary as I opened my Al Gore binder. One night, I had to read The Once and Future King from beginning to end. Another, I had to do a project depicting the Culture Area of Indonesia (more or less) that I'd had all quarter to do.
What do I get now that I've slogged through [the Cliffs Notes to] As I Lay Dying, come up with a plan to save Social Security (in a group, to give props), and gone through other initiation rites of adulthood like posting bail, waitressing with a hangover, and racking up towering debt? The same Sunday night anxiety, times 100, because tomorrow I'll be doing it in front of 75 teenagers who would like nothing better than to see me unravel completely.
Naw, they mean well. But unraveling is the possibility at the back of every teacher's mind. At least mine.
My only consolation is the knowledge that none of my students are reliving my plight. No, they are out hunting boars and spearfishing, or lolling on the beach finishing up the weekend-long rager that will give rise to this week's "dramas," as they looooove to call them, or loading new songs onto their ipods so they'll have something to listen to during classes. To know that my years of heartfelt effort were not in vain--that this generation doesn't have to toil as I did, because of how I helped solve the world's most dire problems--well, that makes it all worthwhile. Rest up, kids. Enjoy your youth!
No comments:
Post a Comment