Moving On, Feeling Blue

The day after tomorrow is my last day at the school where I've been teaching for the past few months. It's been a great experience. I love it there. I have to leave my student teaching position because my session is up. So don't believe any of the rumors you might hear about how I gave some of the little girls Mono. I'll be transferred to a different school and I feel as anxious as I did on that first day when I moved to New York to start as the brand new kid in the first grade. Maybe somebody will buy me big size Star Wars figure like my aunt did to bribe me into going to school every day for the first week. I think it was during the first week that some kids in my class convinced me that I should fight this kindergartener. Apparently fight promotion was the entertainment of choice. I was instigated into it like... like the 6 year old I was. I was sold on the idea by some of the black kids in my class who inspired me with the confidence that I could beat up the little kid with no problem because I was white - just like Superman. I know, it sounds more like what might happen in prison. The only thing more embarrassing than getting my ass whipped by a five- year-old, was having to go classroom to classroom to pick out the little kid who beat me up. "This little kindergartener did that to your face? The one playing with the legos? Are you sure about that?" Double shame.

You grow up and you realize that nothing much changes. You go through your twenties and then you hit 30 and you have this powerful desire to find a place that you can feel is your home. Maybe I never had such a place having bounced around for so long in San Francisco when I was a small fry. Going to my next location for student teaching should be this minor thing. It's nothing that should warrant so much anxiety. It's hard for me to make changes and break emotional ties. I feel like I've just now made a home for myself there. It will be really hard to leave the kids who I've worked with every day for the last eight weeks. I hope none of the kids start to cry because then I'll might start crying and it's hard enough to teach 9 year-olds how to evaluate algebraic equations under normal circumstances. I'm gonna end this blog before I start getting all Doogie Howser with this post. Perhaps it's too late. Yeah, it's too late. It's always easier to leave at the end of the year when the kids are moving on to a new grade and a fresh batch of misfits, malcontents, savants, idiots and budding intellectuals show up and look at you to tell them what to do.

I don't even have my lucky Dukes of Hazard lunch box to give me that all important mystique and street cred that you need when you're the fresh fish at a new school. At least I'll do my damnedest to try and avoid getting drawn into a fight with a blood thirsty kindergartener. Unless he starts up with me. Then he's dog food. Now even the big ones are small enough to throw. I also hate having to be charming and witty and competant all over again. asdfhkl, he wrote, as he just hit his keyboard in sleepy angst. hjasgohi

Wish me luck in getting a mentor teacher who isn't a head case. Oh good, the ludes are kicking in. G-night.

krankiboy