Welcome back, to the same old place we've been laughing about...

First things first: my graduate class last week went really well. It will be a challenging curriculum as far as reading material (amounts), but at the end of the semester I will have a final project that will be a multi-genre model for my lovelies in the late winter when they begin theirs. Sitting in night class again, looking at the mixture of students: some teachers like me, working on a first master's (I'm on number two), some new grad students taking whatever is available in the schedule, and some other English MA's who take whatever is offered by this prof. Since this is class number two for me, and since I am taking her next offered course in Fall 07 (Holocaust Lit), I know how they feel. When you are in the presence of a truly great teacher, you want to stay for as long as possible, hoping that some of their aura can be absorbed in 45 hours or so. This class will be a logical extension from the first one I took with her, right before my fieldwork and methods course, the last formal class I took before student teaching and graduation from MA numero uno (a Master of Arts in Teaching: Secondary Ed./English 7-12). It seems almost serendipitous that my first class back in an MA English track is with her.

Tonight I am hoping to get to bed reasonably early since I start my teaching year in the morning with a Superintendent's Day (meetings all morning; classroom organizing in the afternoon). I went into school with my physical children over two days last week and got all my posters and paraphernalia up and made my procedures and rules copies. I finished my annual letter to my lovelies (their first formal writing assignment is to write back) so I can make copies of that too, once I find some interesting graphics to add to this year's version. Other than that, I am ready for the year to begin, although I am starting to feel that knot in my stomach and throat. This knot, of course, is the physical manifestation of my worries that I have forgotton something( like the names of colleagues, the principals, the students I have not met and the ones I had last year), that I am really not so good at this 'teacher thing' and who am I kidding, and that I will have classes of extremely ill-behaved kids, and is my typical response to the start of the new year. Hopefully, the knot will go away quickly once I actually get started on Wednesday. It is getting harder to swallow.

"September, let us go. It is time to migrate." (line 1) I pastori (The Shepherds); Gabriele D'Annunzio

"Summer has come and passed, the innocent can never last, wake me up when September ends" (lines 1-3) Wake Me Up When September Ends; Billie Joe Armstrong