when you've said Wisconsin...

You've said it all!

In 24 hours, I will be on a plane that will take me HOME to the wonderful, wonderful badger state. I would say that I'm exited, but to be honest, I have tried to put this trip in the back of my mind.

But WHY? you may ask. Well, when I think about coming home, I think about how much I don't want to come back to Mississippi. So, I try and push all the romanticized memories of life in Wisconsin to the back of my mind, and I focus on lesson planning, discipline, grading, stupid district paperwork, etc...

In TFA, right now is not october, but affectionately known as "Sucktober". Apparently October and February are the worst months of the teaching year. If you can make it through these months, you've got the year down. So, it makes sense that life is terrible and hard, right?

My kids are crazy. Literally some periods I cannot teach anything because they talk through the entire class period. I haven't honed my teacher ears enough to catch their voices yet, so there's this constant buzz of talking throughout my whole day. I really like silence. I LOVE silence. So this small chatter annoys me to no end. If Dante had been a teacher, he probably would have put a Middle school classroom in his first circle of hell. The best way I can describe it is like having an earpiece in your ear with a constant murmuring all day long that is just loud enough to be distracting, but not loud enough to be coherent. Try it sometime.

Anyways, I promise that I am done complaining for the night! On a positive note, one of my classes actually got excited about a text today (a little bit). Most of this is because the text involves death. But once we got to the end, they started picking up on the foreshadowing throughout the text really well and actually were invested in the material! Another part of this is the absurd amount of tickets I showered on them for any participation. (I hold a raffle for candy every friday, so every ticket you get increases your chances of winning). When my class is excited and interested, teaching is bearable! Now, I just need to increase this excitement, and decrease the other, distracting craziness.

So- tonight I need to make sub plans, print worksheets, make an assessment, pack, finalize 1st quarter grades. Tomorrow I need to survive for 6 hours of teaching. Then, a weekend in my favorite place in the world- HOME!