Back in Black, Baby

After a wonderfully relaxing honeymoon on a boat in the Atlantic, I had to come back to work. Boo. After a horrible time last week, with my stuff getting stolen and me feeling immense trepidation at being much less prepared for this school year than the past two, my spirits are back up and the rhythm of the school year has sucked me back in. Every once in a while I think about how 3 weeks ago I was enjoying my first night on the cruise, and two weeks ago I was trying to savor every minute of my last night on the boat...and I fill myself with ideas of finding a job that pays twice what I make and allows me to take vacation whenever I want. Or regret for not being born a too rich jet-setter with an overblown sense of entitlement. Instead I trudge into work every day at inhumane hours and deal with other people's children, settling for a salary that barely allows me to afford travel and a schedule that restricts me to peak vacation time. Sometimes I wonder why I do what I do. Like when I come back from summer vacation to find that the most promising student in the whole school is pregnant, due in June, and seems to have given up on finishing high school; and finding out that one of the boys who seemed the most promiscuous last year has had HIV all along because he was born with it; and wondering where that ridiculously talented-yet-troubled boy is, then finding out he has been shipped off to the south somewhere because he fathered a child in Brooklyn and his mother doesn't want him to have anything to do with the still -unborn baby. Yes, I work at that school where teachers are afraid to work, going there is the threat that kids hear when they get bad grades, and fully grown adults cross the street when they approach to avoid getting jumped. There are times when it's all worth it, like when students I had as 9th graders come to me as 11th graders to show me poems and stories they had written, not for class, but because they wanted to; and when I see that moment on a student's face that says that everything all of a sudden became clear because of something I did or said. These things happen a lot because, frankly, I'm a damn good teacher and not many kids need a damn good teacher as much these kids do. So, while I sometimes find myself at Dunkin Donuts envying the cashier's job, I am good where I am at the moment.