The first three days

I wonder why it is that the intention of this blog was to share my experiences in the classroom and yet I have been in the classroom for three days now and I have not shared one experience. I am guessing it is because there is so much and at the same time so little to say that it is easier to say nothing at all. It is that, mixed with the sheer exhaustion of managing 28 seven year olds from 7:15 to 4, with their wiggling, nose picking, sometimes crying, and often chit-chatting little bodies. But oh are they cute.

To those people who have read my blog since the beginning, you have seen how difficult it was at times. Those first two weeks of my experience as a first year corps member in a brand new city gave life to some blog posts that inspired friends to call me just to ask, "Are you okay?!" They would say, "I've been reading your blog!" Those readers could see through my words that I was scared and lonely, unsure if I would be able to live up to the huge pressure that was about to be placed upon my shoulders. At the time, I felt like I had to prove to others and myself that I was not the type of person who ever got scared or lonely, but that I was the type of person who hopped on planes to Guatemala fearlessly and moved across the country, leaving friends and family behind. Yet now that I have built a life for myself here I am not at all ashamed to reflect upon those first two weeks and share them for what they were...a rough time, but a rough time that is now over. I am certainly happy here. I feel as though my life has great purpose and I am taking charge over the kind of life that I want to have, I love my neighborhood and my apartment, I have my own Netflix account and my own health insurance, a TFA family and entirely new set of friends. Even in the shade of those first two weeks, lonely and missing my comforts, I knew that the hard times would pass. I knew that I would end up in this place soon, with friends and roots. I knew that by Labor Day weekend I would be ready to show off my new fabulous Carrie Bradshaw-esque lifestyle to visitors, but strangely the only common variable between my old life in LA and this new life here is me. In the end, I was the one who stuck with me long enough to see it through, so now I will show off my life to me and see it for what it is. With the beginning of school I have now really begun my journey, a time which will be the most challenging of my life and will most certainly fly by. Who knows what my life will look like when it is over, but at least I know who the common variable will be. The journey leading up to the first day of school has now ended, and here I am as a real teacher.

Teaching is hard. Teaching second graders is even harder. I love them so much already it is hard to imagine how much more I could love them by the end of the year but I know that I will as my journey has only just begun. I have so much to learn it is completely and all-consumingly overwhelming, as every moment in the classroom I am hovering in this unsettling balance between "I have no idea what the hell I am doing, " and "I desperately want to find out." I can tell that the learning curve this year will be amazingly steep and incredibly necessary. First and foremost I need to identify the extra needs of my students, 100% minorities and 77% on free lunch and breakfast, while simultaneously accepting no excuses. I must not accept excuses from myself either, as I am officially on this journey and failure is not an option.