Gentlemen... Start Your Engines!......

Hello, Dear Readers - Happy 2012-2013 to all of you professional teacher types.  I hope the summer was as good to you as it was to me - I have returned *mostly* rested and *mostly* enthusiastic.  I know I wasn't as vigilant about posting as often as I would have liked last year - I confess that I penned many a thought that died a horrible death in draft development hell.  Alas.

This year I have an interesting new development - the string coach who has been working for me for the last four years is now officially my student teacher.  I am excited to have an extra pair of eyes, ears and hands around.   At the same time I'm a little self-conscious about my qualifications as a master teacher.  I've always thought that in order to be a master teacher, you have to have your shit down well enough to say "THIS is how you do the job...."  Here I am trying to re-invent myself, never having felt like I *ever* had a good grasp of how to do this job.... and to be honest, part of the reason I took her on was to help nudge me along my own path of self-improvement.  Anyway, I've decided to share this blog with her as a way of reflecting on the daily experience of being a public school music teacher.  So here it goes -

So this last weekend was the first of the new school year.  I spent most of it here, in my classroom.  My wife very graciously agreed to take the kid over to the in-laws for the weekend, which actually is the normal M.O. on most weekends.  But this weekend in particular, I really needed it.  Teachers who are married to non-teachers often run into static when they spend personal time at work, or preparing for work (which accounts for a lot of the "off" time during the school year)  My wife got used to it after a while - but only after she found out that her teacher sister-in-law drags her brother to the school occasionally to help change the bulletin boards.

This is just the life.  To the young teacher, it's going to feel like the job is wrapping around you like a boa constrictor and squeezing the life out of you.  To an older teacher, it feels like... well it just feels like your life.   It's kind of like the way people tell you that after you have a kid, you'll stop going to the movies and eating out.  Then when you finally have your own kid, you're so distracted by the rush of new-parenthood, you forget to notice that you stopped going to the movies and to restaurants.  Then one day you stop and try to remember when the last time was that you went out, and you realized you never made a conscious decision not to, it just happened.  That's how the teachers life creeps up on you, except it's a little more traumatic at the beginning (at least with parenthood, you get a cute little baby to distract you from how much your life has suddenly changed).  

Sometimes I tell people "Yeah... I spent most of the weekend doing school work" as a way of getting sympathy, but the honest truth is I really don't mind being here.  Really.  It's actually kind of fun.  I can crank up my tricked-out wireless audio system, watch a movie while I work... and there's no line for the school copier. But really, the advantage to spending time on the weekend is that it makes the weekday survival smoother.  Sometimes, it just makes it *possible*   It really depressed me at first - just like the fact that I had also permanently abandoned my days of sleeping in until 10 a.m. (ah, the life of a college student)  That was back when I had to get up at 6 a.m. to get to my teaching gig on time - now I wake up an hour earlier, and stay later... all by choice.

So if and when that horrible realization hits you that you will never again be a carefree twenty-something... don't worry... we all had to go through that.  Just like we all had to give up diapers at some point (talk to me son about that one... we're still working on it.)