Yesterday was election day, so there was no school.
Today was rough. It’s hard to come back from a day off in the middle of the week and I’m struggling to find a sustainable strategy for any of my classes. My Seminar 1 classes are meant to be remediation, but I don’t know if I am re-mediating the right skills, and the students don’t take pre-tests seriously so I can’t get accurate data to know what to remediate. So I just pick topics I know most students struggle with and they all do that together. This means the class is mostly a bunch of disconnected topics from week to week and it’s hard to find cohesion.
My geometry is a continual frustration. It is too big. The range of skills of students is too wide. I’m teaching to the upper 50% and it’s leaving the bottom 50% in the dust and I’m serious when I say I don’t think there is any other practical answer given the context. If I teach to the bottom 50% I just switch which half of the class I am doing a disservice to. I really should have two classes made from the one I have, but frankly I don’t want to teach that second class of geometry with the bottom 50%. I know that sounds like I don’t care about the bottom 50%, but I do care about them. I teach 4 periods of them in Seminar and care about them very much. I’ve been doing all day for 2 years (now going on 3) with classes of students who struggle and it starts to get to you. It’s too much. I need a break in the afternoon or SOMETHING. I’m ready to throw in the towel completely.
I told a few admins today that I feel ready to quit. Not for this year, of course. I will honor the end of my contract. But maybe for next year. I am ready to not dread work every single day. This job has sent me in an ambulance in a hospital thinking I was having a heart attack, but it turned out to just be stress. I’m on high blood pressure medicine now. As much as I have been working to lower stress (and joined rugby as an outlet for stress and get in shape) I have been suffering from depression and anxiety and random moments of just feeling angry. This job has harmed my mental and physical health and although there are moments of good, I am getting fed up. Even as I have improved as a teacher, I still feel so discouraged. I just don’t know.