Late Last Night, When We Were All In Bed...

I have a real job now. I teach ninth grade English at a middle school close by. I ride my bike there and home. I pass goats, chickens, and a llama. I watch the moon fade into the morning sky and the sunrise shine over the eastern mountains. I mainly feel that I am a good version of myself. Not a perfect version, not the best version, but a good version. I am happy with that. I can't ask for more.

I love teaching. I can't believe that they pay me to do this. I love having my own room to set up and organize (it is true, I have a color palette). Most people who come to my house say that my home is so me. My classroom is the same way. It feels like mine.

I have way too many students in a class. Think 35, six times a day. I have resource kids and students with all kinds of problems which by law I am required to track, take care of, and teach. Then I have kids that have already read everything on the reading list for this year, and in the library, and are smart as can be. I have to teach them too.

On Monday, half of them had to leave their homes because the Oquirrhs were on fire. The entire night I watched the magnificent fire from my bedroom window and worried over my students and their families and their horses and their BMX bikes. These ninth graders have worked their way to my heart and squeezed it 'til it hurts. And in the middle of the night I thought, "who else is worried over the 9th graders?" I mean, don't most people wish they would just disappear until say 17, when the teens brains start working again? Expendable? But I love them, in all their missing-frontal-lobal-and-brain-not-functioning-glory.

So there.