The End is Near

I only have one day left at Goshen Middle School. My how time flies! One day left and about 5 or 6 sticky notes floating around my room of things to blog about, relating to my work at the Middle School. I guess that's both the blessing and the curse of my time there: there are endless challenges, struggles, joys, things to think about... and so much time out of my day is taken up! Granted, I don't have lesson planning to do after school, but I come home, try to exercise, cook supper or both. Then I get some chores accomplished, try to save a little time for friends and before I know it it's bedtime.

(Interesting tangent related to sleeping: In CO I used to wake up just before my alarm went off at 7 am. It was great! I woke up at a good point in my sleep cycle and the day felt tolerable from its beginning. Then I moved to Goshen in February, and even though I began waking up at 6:30 every single day I could not get my body into it's auto-wake up rhythm! Then, about a week ago, it started working for me again. I'd wake up at 6:25, look around my sunlit room and look frantically at my alarm clock, believing I had forgotten to set it (This was actually the case about 2 weeks ago!). Ohhhhh. Sunlit room. I found the other magic ingredient. Waking-up-at-the-same-time-every-day + sun = auto alarm clock. Cool.)

Back to getting sentimental about leaving my present job. This week started out sentimental. Then yesterday and today, I had two very tiresome and draining days in a row. I utterly failed in one tutoring session (example after example did not convey the fairly abstract concept of proportion), kids were rowdy, I overhead a few kids actively missing the original (and ultimate) holder of my position, and many of my tutoring and intervention attempts were either ill-received or seemingly ineffective. So much for going out with a bang.

But today as I was leaving my last class of the day, the teacher whose class it was stopped me to say good bye and wish me well. "Thank you so much for all your help in my class. You were really effective working with the kids. They really listened to you and seemed to look up to you. I'm sure you'll go far if you continue down this path. And I'd be glad to be a reference for you."

And suddenly, despite my frustrations and shortcomings this week, all was validated. Yeah. I did build some good relationships with those kids. And no I didn't just socialize with them and play cool Mr. para. I demanded their best effort in the most encouraging way I could. Sometimes I made friends, sometimes enemies, and I earned my fair share of respect. I done good.

-- As if to reinforce those proud and happy feelings, a student burst out of Kroger as I was exiting, post grocery shopping. "Hi Mr. Rody!" she blurted. "Hi Ana," I replied and smiled to myself as I unlocked my bike. --