soy in apple.

NYC public schools started Wednesday, September 9. Tomorrow, I'll be teaching my tenth day of class, and thus far, I've survived the first two weeks of school and shown up to the third week. Given that I feel like I've been through a decade-long war, this is going to be a long nine months. Luckily, I haven't been infected with any sort of plague by my 130 students and the fact that I haven't quit yet is a huge plus.

Over the past two weeks, I've developed some teacher tendencies that are hard to forget in a normal social setting. Oftentimes, I have the urge to correct someone's misbehavior while someone else is speaking, but I tend to swear like a sailor when I'm no longer the teacher. The professional clothes and the stern attitude sufficiently masks my fear that my students will expose me for the fraud I am. My #1 goal each day? To keep them as busy as possible so they don't have the opportunity to speak.

What gets me through each day is an emotional detachment from everything I'm doing--I know what I'm doing each day (kind of) and I'm doing it well (hopefully), but I'm not feeling anything until I get home and crash everyday. I've desperately missed obtaining an education myself. I constantly think about how mundane the material in the Living Environment Core Curriculum is and I wish that I could be talking about what interests me.

As I sat in one of my "graduate" classes this evening, I read a paper about how social rejection, anguish, and self-injury are related on a neurobiological level. It was utterly exhilarating to read, absorb, and question this new piece of material while considering the experiments I would perform if given the supplies. Having thought about going to medical school for a long time, I'm suddenly debating whether I want to go to an M.D., Ph.D., or M.D./Ph.D. program.

I feel so lucky that I'm young and that I have plenty of time to decide, but I also feel that this job is going to age me a lifetime. I'm losing my hair and have gone down an entire pant/skirt size since mid-August. I have too much white hair for a 21-year-old college graduate, a feature that another teacher at my school has already commented on. I pampered myself last weekend with a pricey pedicure, but honestly what I need is a good massage and a break from my obligations. I know that teachers only work 180 days of the year, and only now do I understand why most teachers opt not to teach summer school.

I'm interested to see where I'll end up by October.