Despite the fact that I thought that nobody even read my blogs, my friends have drawn my attention to the fact that my blogging has been sadly lacking of late. There are many reasons for this. Around the time of my last blog (just after returning from the central trip) I broke up with my fiancée. It was my decision after I came to the realisation that I loved him, but was not in love with him (something I think that is an important distinction to make). We lived in our unit together for 3 weeks (me in the spare room) until I found a place to live and I have now been in my new unit (renting) with my 19-year-old brother for nearly 3 weeks and I am settling in nicely.
I guess for the first 5 weeks of this term I felt like I was simply surviving through each day, going through the motions, sitting at my desk but getting nothing done and avoiding going back to the unit that I was still sharing with my now-ex-fiancée. I did not have the head-space for half of the things that school expects of me and that I expect of myself and I found myself in survival mode. Unfortunately I don’t really think that school is the sort of environment that is necessarily conducive to survival mode. Don’t get me wrong – I did survive, and everything is relatively back on track now, but looking back on the last 5 weeks, I wonder how I did survive. My year 12’s were what really stressed me out. Teaching the creation of the new society in Russia after the revolution for the first time having lost a week of my holidays on Central and then the second week breaking up with my fiancée meant that I had not planned my classes to the level where I felt confident and competent. And when you wake up in the morning feeling ill-prepared and stressing about the day to come, it really takes its toll on you. Because I was also still dealing with the issues that come with a break-up, trying to concentrate at work or on work in order to learn the content myself proved almost impossible. Some days all I needed was to talk to people and so when I wasn’t teaching that is what I did. Despite my overriding desire to soldier on, sometimes you also need to take time out for yourself and I did that too whenever I could.
This week though I feel like I am getting my life (and my brain!) back. I have done my Year 7 correction and this weekend will work on my Year 12 Sacs and the first ½ of my Year 11 Macbeth essays before the second class finish and then the two classes do their exams. To top it all off it is report writing season at our school and the stress for everyone is not writing the reports but getting 10 weeks of assessment done in 6 ½ weeks in order to have it corrected in time to go on the reports in week 7. This season at school really brings out the whingeing too and so to combat the incessant sooking that is going on at my school I have taken to plugging into my i-pod before school, after school and at any other moment when I am sitting at my desk and likely to hear the complaints. The only downside to this anti-social behaviour is that I cannot hear when there is a student at the door of our office, even when someone calls out to me! The student that spent 5 minutes standing at the door waiting for me yesterday when I had no idea he was there was less than impressed with my i-pod excuse! We are only up to week 6 and counting though so the complaining is sure to be combined shortly with the devastation that ensues when some gammy who cannot use the report program saves over their reports with another class, or somehow performs some other strange function which deletes their reports. Was that really bitchy! Oh well! The drama of it all! There is something to be said for those people who just shut their trap and get the hell on with it! The serenity!
