The Home Stretch

Well, I'm down to the final stretch in this marathon that is my first-year teaching. Last Thursday was the last day I saw all of my seniors as that Friday was unofficial senior cut day and this week is senior exam week (except none of the seniors have to take exams). I can't say that I will miss them at all. There are really very few redeeming things about teaching seniors. I'll teach them again because it's a job, but if I could afford to be picky I would never teach seniors again.

These last couple weeks since the SOL tests have been a weird combination of relaxation and unneeded stress. The lesson planning isn't stressful. I honestly so lesson-planned out and so sick of teaching 'new' content I can't even tell you. I've pretty much been winging it and making it up in the 10 minutes before I leave for school. I'm teaching current issues and showing lots of videos. They watched Hotel Rwanda and we had a Socratic Seminar about it, then watched a documentary about North Korea. I taught them about Tianamen Square and current issues in China today. We had a class discussion today about what the term terrorism means and what their goals are. It should be interesting stuff and it is all stuff I really want them to learn. The problem is they've checked out. As one of my brightest students even said to me today when asking if he could make up a quiz from last week during math class, "SOLs are over. We're not doing anything." The kids know it and it's hard to convince them otherwise. I can't force them to pay attention to what I'm teaching them right now. I'm not going to test them on it the last day of school and they know that.

While their behavior and outlook about these last days bothers me, I can't be too much of a hypocrite. After all, I did just confess I haven't put a terrible amount of thought into my lessons these last couple weeks either. Bottom line is, I'm ready to cross that finish line and be able to say I did it. I finished my first year teaching. Two more days of class and then one week of finals and workdays to go.

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...