Appreciation

I had a tough day today, but only inside my head. The kids were good and I had an easy day (long quiz and short reading assignment). I was exhausted. I was up way too late on Tuesday night (Yay Obama!) and had a rough evening last night (it took me three trips to the gym to find an open treadmill, and other things). My back was hurting and my foot was hurting as well. I think the floor at our "new" school is harder than what I'm used to. It was just a long day. This week has been challenging and exhausting.

I still can't talking about how much I love my job, though. My mom pointed out that this year's blog talks a lot more "we" than last year's. That perfectly sums up my year so far (finishing week 10). I'm part of a team. We work together to education children. We help each other all the time. We work to help each other improve and to make our lives easier, because we work hard enough as it is. Not only does it make us happier, it makes the school better. It helps us educate better and it helps our kids go to college (and graduate college!). I didn't have that. I was working alone, and a school full of teachers working alone. It was much more challenging, much more stressful, and much less successful.

And still, I'm completely blown away whenever we're shown appreciation. We've had a rough week, but we've been working on a modified scheduled, so we've been able to go home a little bit after 4PM every day. Today, we had a faculty meeting planned at 4:30. I went to the prescribed location, and the group was waiting in the hallway. As we walked into the room, someone commented that it smelled funny. And we saw that they had laid out a table of plastic cups each filled with a little bit of champagne, and a sign saying, "Welcome back home, Vailsburg." We had a toast to our hard work this week, and discussed the logistics of packing up and moving back home. We also got to watch a slideshow of our adventures here.

Yet again, I love this place.