Here it is: the third and final installment in this series. I would write more but I’ve started my third year of teaching, and if I blog about my students and employers while I work there, I may get fired.Which I don’t want, since everything is going great. Except for the day when I got confused about when school started and showed up almost an hour late, which wasn’t my fault, although for some reason it didn’t happen to anyone else in the entire school. Not even the person I told to come at wrong time. There have been days in the past two years when I have felt unemployable, and that was one of them.
My new school is a big change, primarily because it does not measure success in staff and student tears. So far no one wants me to suffer, and no one wants me to quit. It makes me uncomfortable. I feel like they don’t know what I’m like yet, and when they figure it out, they too will seek to squash me like a bug.
But I’m trying not to let that happen. For example, apparently they can’t stand it when teachers come late. Late is my middle name. “Issues with time” is one of the top three personality traits that make me who I am. But I haven’t come late once in the past two weeks, except for the day I got confused, and while that doesn’t sound like an accomplishment, it is for me (yes, I am that bad).
Something I’m happy about, though, is the lack of discipline problems I’ll have to deal with. I told another teacher about Fire Boy from my last school, and she was horrified. “The biggest issue I’ve had to deal with was a couple years ago when a student spilled mouthwash in class,” she said.
Excuse me? I didn’t show how confused I was because I didn’t want to seem like the unqualified teacher who doesn’t get what’s wrong with mouthwash, but I did not see the problem. Was she throwing the mouthwash at someone? Was she drinking it for the alcohol content? If clumsiness is a discipline issue, I’ll end up sending myself to the principal. Also, I don’t think that teacher appreciates how lucky she is to have students hygienic enough to carry mouthwash with them to school. Fire Boy probably would have found a way to turn it into an explosive.
I truly don’t have much else to say on this topic right now, almost as if I have come to peace with the last two years. That can’t be entirely true because I recently dreamed I took my boy’s class to a hospital and they trampled a disabled child, but I think I’m getting there. I feel like I’m already a better teacher than I was two weeks ago, and it makes me sad that I couldn’t be as good with my last students. I’m also sad because I miss them. You spend a year trying to get through to a group of people, and if you put your heart into your work, the sense of loss is inevitable. The teacher’s curse is caring about their students even when the students do not care about them.
On a lighter note, we had a professional development lecturer come and, since he was a math teacher, he used math problems in his examples. I left feeling great about myself since I know that 16 X 5 is not 400. I used to think this was a joke:
It’s not. It’s definitely not. That’s all I’m going to say.
Half-Blood Kuwaiti 
Your articles on teaching experience is simultaneously entertaining and relatable . I would love you to keep up the good work. As a fellow teacher,I understand the hard fact of the mentioned teacher’s curse. You certainly would love to bear the fruit of your effort and time, seeing how the realtionship between you and the students grow. I am glad you are getting there! Would love to see more posts on how much freedom you are given to set up your own lessons and syllabus. And how you develop this connection between you and your students.
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