The Budding Optimist

I had been hoping that if I failed to contact anyone from my new (middle) school, they would forget that they had hired me to teach there and just go on paying me without expecting me to show up. I think my years in Hazelwood set me up with false expectations about how payroll works.  Alas, I received a phone call (people still make such things!), asking which day I was available to come in. The woman whose room I'm moving into is just moving to the gym to be a PE teacher. She never introduced herself, just asked what I was doing there and why. Then told me I was doing it wrong. Not off to a great start. The man I report to has a beard that's half wavy, half straight, and exceedingly long. He's apparently quite brilliant but it's hard to tell because he constantly starts slow-moving sentences and then leaves them trailing off in the middle so he can start new ones. The entire time I was meeting with him, I kept envisioning myself grabbing the beard and whacking the whol

All the best poems are the sad ones. Here are some of my faves: Tonight I Can Write (the Saddest Lines) Time Does Not Bring Relief; You All Have Lied and of course... One Art All the best poets were sad people. Maybe the poetry came first, or maybe the sadness did. Whatever the case, there's definitely a correlation. Poetry makes you mentally ill, or mental illness produces beauty. Take your pick. I am not a poet. But if the inside of my head were a poem, it would look like this: "Boxes" by E. R. T. That's the corner of my classroom, stacked with boxes of the books I've bought my students over the years. I don't even want to take them with me anymore. What's the point? I'm just going to have to move again, and every time I move, I lose books, and I lose students, and I lose friends and potential. I was talking to another new-to-the-building teacher today on plan period. "I got a $15,000 raise to come here, and I'm thinking about just going bac

  I asked Jade once how to tell when your panic and anxiety is your intuition saying that something isn't a good idea, versus how to tell when it's just your neuroses telling you that literally everything  is a bad idea and you should stay home in bed, where it's safe. For example. I have a dear friend who to this day cannot look at pictures of her own wedding because the day was so traumatizing. She literally wept and vomited her way through it, she was that  anxiety-ridden. It took all the stoicism I had not to tell her to RUN, that a wedding shouldn't be this traumatic.  But that was a few years ago, and she's happily married now. So, what do I know?  In my mind, there's no way you should be violently weeping and throwing up because you're so anxious about spending your life with someone, yeah? But for her, it really was neuroticism and nerves. So, how the hell can you tell? How do you learn to trust your gut when your gut is constantly lying to you? If t