Monday morning, the alarm goes off at 5:10. I manage to get up pretty quickly, and spend a little while shuffling around the kitchen, washing dishes and making coffee. After showering and combing my hair and whatnot, I spent fifteen minutes or so blearily checking blogs and news and stuff, and then (once I’ve woken up enough) another twenty minutes or so writing comments on student homeworks. I’m dressed and out the door around seven, stopping to pick up some more coffee on the way. The drive to school is mostly uneventful, and I’m parked and in the door and at my desk at around a quarter to eight, which gives me almost forty-five minutes to finish prepping my morning classes. Monday mornings are always like this somehow–before I left on Friday, I thought I was all set for Monday morning, but when I show up at school there’s somehow all this other stuff that needs to be done.
So. First period is ninth-graders, part three of a four- or five-part set of lessons about the transatlantic slave trade, where we discuss the economics of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. How did the slave trade turn a person into a commodity, and who profits as a result? Second period is AP World, where we’re looking at how Europe rebuilt both politically and socially after the Black Death. (Over the summer, my department head found a stack of classroom maps on world history topics, and I’ve been rotating them through the classroom when they seem appropriate. The map set feels kind of old-school, but can’t actually be that old, since they’re all in excellent condition. The “Mongol and Turkic Conquests” map from a few weeks ago was followed by the “Christendom and the Crusades” map, but as we’re moving into the early modern period I replaced the Crusades map with “The Peoples of Europe”, which is basically just a political map of Europe with over 30 different linguistic groups marked off by region. It feels almost gloriously useless, as maps go, but it’s very pretty.)
Third period, I’m back in the department office, sorting out my papers and finishing the last of my (now very cold) coffee before starting to make phone calls. Later this week, we have a day set aside for parents to come in and have conferences with their kids’ academic advisors, which makes this week a little more hectic than usual. I spend all of third period on the phone: responding to a few conference rescheduling requests, collecting information from my advisee’s teachers, giving information to other advisors, that kind of thing. (And somewhere in the middle of it, fielding a weird message from my mother, who had just come across a stack of my old high-school literary magazines and was demanding to know who I was in love with in tenth grade that had prompted me to write such sad things. I mean really.) Third period on the phone, fourth period split between answering emails (more advisor requests for information about how the kids in my classes are doing) and more class prep (among other things, trying to find a balance for my tenth-graders, in terms of how much they need to know about the Mexican-American War).
After that, it seems like the rest of the day slides by too quick to notice. Fifth period I eat lunch, down in the faculty cafeteria, and it’s nice to have a little break and talk with other teachers, although really all we talk about is the upcoming parent conferences, and anyway I leave a little early in the hopes of getting some more grading done. Sixth period is the “economics of slavery” lesson with a different class of ninth-graders, and once again I am surprised (as I am almost every day) how the exact same lesson plan can execute so very differently with different students. Seventh period I don’t teach, but instead have back-to-back meetings with students about various course-related issues, and eighth period is my tenth-grade US History class, where we combine Manifest Destiny and the aforementioned Mexican-American War material.
After school, I have a window of about ten minutes to enter my attendance for the day and answer a few time-sensitive emails, and then I’ve got a departmental meeting, where we’re discussing the paper assignments upcoming in some of our classes. Without going into too much detail about the meeting, I just want to say that I have wonderful coworkers. One of the many things I enjoy about my job is the frequency with which I get to have these great conversations, full of thoughtful and insightful points about both history and pedagogy.
Anyway. By four-fifteen or so I’m in the car and heading home, and traffic isn’t too bad today, so I’m back in Brooklyn before five. But then I remember a bunch of errands that need doing, and it ends up being more like six-fifteen that I’m finally back in my apartment. What with having been sick all weekend and not sleeping the night before, I’m exhausted, and once I’m in my house and sitting on the couch I suddenly realize that I’ve basically been running on borrowed energy all day. I get fifteen or twenty minutes of sitting floppily on the couch and being exhausted before I realize that I’m starving, and Matt suggests our cozy neighborhood Chinese place, which coincidentally is just across the street. We have a lovely dinner, but by the time we get home I’m basically done for the night–I have just enough brainpower to watch a little TV off the TiVo and poke half-heartedly at a computer game, which means I don’t in any way have enough brainpower to grade, or answer more email, or update for the first day of Holidailies.
The days aren’t all like this! And please understand that I don’t mean to complain. Every single thing I had to do on Monday was satisfying and enjoyable and a fully-justified part of my job. I love what I do, and this is all part of what I do. But I did miss the first day of Holidailies, and will undoubtedly miss more days of Holidailies, because while not -every- day is like this, a lot of them are. Some days just feel like I’m running the engine until the tank is empty.
Posted Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 7:43 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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Well spotted, Mom.