All that you have is your soul (Tracy Chapman).

Sunday 28 October 2007

Into The Pit

I guess you could call it one of those "unknowns".

Tomorrow, I will be starting the second part of this term at the school and I really don't know what lies ahead. I'll be spending the next twelve hours or so preparing, marking and recording in the naive belief (or maybe hope) that I will have adequately covered myself for the next five days.

I could go down the road of panicking and chewing my nails off their petrified little fingers, but I choose to face each day as a new challenge and deal with the mass of obstacles as they hurtle towards me at meteoric speed. I know that whatever I do, it probably won't be enough, but that's the nature of the beast we call 'teaching in the earliest part of the twenty-first century'.

The paperwork is endless, the deadlines often so close that you can almost touch them with your nose and the expectations higher than the nearest star. That said, I wake up each day with a sort of smile, knowing that I will meet all of the above, somehow or other.

As bad as it can get, the Xmas holiday is but seven-and-a-half weeks away and believe me, this is the kind of thinking you need when you don't know the depth of the pit you're falling into.

To be frank, I'm dreading my fortieth birthday much more and that's in five weeks time.


(I wish I hadn't just written the above because it's suddenly made me feel much worse...)

No comments: