With only two days to go, I am completely spent. It usually takes two weeks at the start of summer to get the energy back. This is the hard thing for people to get who've never done it. Just how emotionally, physically, and even spiritually spent you get from the job.
And I've come to the conclusion, it's not really the kids that drain the batteries all the way down. It's what other adults heap on you. It's the absentee parents that expect us to raise their children for them. It's the politicians that want to blame us for a school system they refuse to fund adequately because schools don't pay for their re-elections. It's the fringe element in education who don't want to work with kids but who want to travel around and have the taxpayers pay them to tell us how we should be doing things.
I'm not tired of having the smiling faces greet me at the door. I'm not tired of working my butt off to see the proverbial light finally come on behind the eyes. I'm not tired of giving up the extra hours of what could be my own time to coach the kids who need that time and activity to keep them out of trouble.
No, I'm tired of the endless piles of paperwork and the e-mails that seem to come back to life more times than Jason and Freddy Kruger combined. I'm tired of explaining to parents that that have sat by like a dormant volcano, never lifting a finger to hold their child accountable for months, only to erupt with a few days left in the school year when their child won't pass and now they're faced with the inconvenience of summer school.
It's times like these when I can see how some of those understaffed USPS workers can "Go Postal." Two more days, a bottle of 1800, and days out on the river will patch it up all over again. After 22 years, I just wonder how many more I have in me before I finally won't want to answer the bell again at the end of August. Hopefully it's still a long ways off.
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