Wassa Matta You? (Marx Brothers)

A question I keep asking myself since I've returned to work. It has been four weeks back on the job (the first week really doesn't count because there weren't any students). The second week went smoothly. However, last week was, and I mean this with all sincerity, the pits. For some reason, the beginning of last year's school term was completely obliterated from my memory. Vivid images of little girls blatantly ignoring me or chatting loudly non-stop while I'm teaching or getting up out of their seats to just, oh lemme see, go chat with my buddy over there and then get some more of our friends to come and join us, and while we're doing that, let's play hair saloon and do each other's hair, well for some unknown reason all of that just completely vanished from my mind. Must be how women describe childbirth and how they can get pregnant again after experiencing such intense pain: after the baby comes and that whirlwind of activity begins, all drama of the delivery room is buried deep within the recesses of the brain. (I can't claim that because I was totally knocked out during my delivery, but I DO remember when the doctor began to separate my muscle walls after the incision and that is the reason I was put to sleep . . . so to speak, but I digress .)

That was only one aspect to my lovely re-entry to reality. Additionally, we, the Licensed Teachers, were ever so politely asked to leave the local teachers’ gathering room during lunch. In effect, find another place to eat because, and we mean this in all kindness, you are too loud and it’s too crowded with the five of you in here. Now, to be honest I know I can be loud but when I say I wasn’t loud this year, believe me, I wasn’t. 1. It was too early in the year to be laughing and having a grand ole time, and 2. I was too busy trying to get my bearings in my class and during my lunch break, I’d sit there and try to figure out, “What the H am I going to do when I return to that class to establish learning?” So I now eat in my classroom and the other LTs join me there so we can have some comraderie. I have done my best to not let the room change become a wedge between the local teachers and me. Still there is an emotional distance now because when we would eat together, we would socialize and get to know each other a little better, or so I thought. Now I see them only in passing or when I go to their room to get my lunch from the refrigerator and we smile and greet one another, but we all know that it’s not the same.

So, I’m thinking that acculturation may take more than a year, at least for me. I thought I had gotten accustomed to working here. Actually, I had but that was after a year of training students to the standard I wanted. Now, I feel like Sidney Poitier in “To Sir With Love” at the end of the movie when his first year class has graduated and some of his students for the upcoming year wander into his classroom and taunt him with their surliness. That was then; this is now. So I am keeping in mind that their behavior can and eventually will change but I was hoping I didn’t have to go through the blood, sweat, and tears route again, and maybe it’s the latter that has thrown me. As a colleague said, “I thought this year would be easier because we had gone through the first year which is usually the toughest. But this year it seems just as hard.”