I had a dream last night...

The title for this post is to be sung to the tune of the song that starts out with those words from Baz Luhrman's modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, because I caught that on TV just last night, before I had this dream, which goes as follows:

I dreamt I had returned to my old school (must have been thinking a lot about my regrets or something?). I saw Meg, my best friend at work back at that school, who decided to leave shortly after I did. I had quit, true to reality, and was just coming back to visit, but Meg seemed to be working there still. I walked in and she was sitting kind of crouched over at a corner desk and no one else was around. So, I asked her, "Where IS everyone?"

She turned around and said, as if not too surprised that I was visiting, but in the height of frustration, "No one EVER hangs out in this office anymore. And just LOOK at their desks!" My eyes followed her gesturing hand and took in the sight of everyone's desks, which were all cleared off. She was complaining that they were TOO organized, which made me wake up chuckling, because the piles cascading from our desks, which used to face one another, were the office joke, so when we packed up during our last few days, A LOT of jokes were made about how people would NOT miss that about us. It's funny, because our first few e-mails after we both started our new jobs focused on a) how much we missed the office banter and b) how nice it was to have more space at our new jobs to keep track of our things. I guess the dream was some kind of attempt being made by my psyche to remind me that staying in D.C. may not have been the best option either, yet I find myself feeling even more regret today that I'm not still there.

It's just that I can't help feeling as though people at the school where I'm teaching now are taking me for granted. Ironically, I am putting in so much more effort to do things right and to be a good teacher, I think because my social life is stagnating and I'm anxious to please in the interest of securing more permanent employment next year, but I'm getting paid WAY less to do it and I'm in such a big school now that my efforts are mostly going unnoticed. I showed up SIX minutes late for tutoring today and got reprimanded by the librarian, who had just turned the students waiting to see me away. I kept looking at the clock and wondering what the hell was going on, reminding her that tutoring starts at 2:45 (and wanting to point out that teachers who have just finished teaching all day without preps may occasionally need a little more time than fifteen minutes to move on to an after-school job), but in the end, I realized I was just being treated like the hired help and the first thing I had done wrong since starting work almost two months ago was being treated as this colossal error. I don't know--maybe on top of my status as a second-class employee who is only a sub is the fact that she may remember me still as a student, because she was librarian back then, too. I don't know why THAT should count against me, though; I was the nerdy student who came in to study quietly at lunch and I never lost books or turned them in late. And I won't even start on the days when, during the ONLY period that I have to prep, the office has called and expected me to fill in last-minute for people calling in sick, for no extra pay, because I'm the hired sub who gets paid a measley $110 a day without benefits. Nevermind the fact that I'm teaching a full schedule and get one prep period only once every other day, so I am fully expected to plan and grade everything as a full-time teacher would.

The same is true with my students right now, too. I spent all week busting my ass to create a delightful Jeopardy review game for my kids to get ready for their test and when I administered the tests, which I had also spent a long time tailoring to each period, complete with funny inside jokes for the questions testing vocab and parts of speech, I realized that the kids had totally tuned out the review sessions and failed to take much advantage at all of the week I gave them to study and prepare. And rather than letting it go and chalking it up to something that would maybe teach them to study better in the future, I only felt guilty as I watched them wiggle and squirm, as if I had done something wrong, not them.

How do people have love lives and families on top of this, is my question. I have enough with the guilt complexes I feel for not being superhuman as their teacher; I can't imagine adding on the guilt of not being more available to my own boyfriend/spouse or children. All I can say is ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH....