I was driving home from school today and I felt this sense of relief that it was the weekend and I wouldn't have to go back for two days. Then, immediately thereafter, I started to feel awful that that's how I feel about my job. I guess no one really likes their job, but mine makes me feel physically sick. I'm stressed out and preoccupied with work all the time. I'm crazy overworked because I feel like I have to work that hard to keep from failing even more miserably than I already am. I don't even think I can write about how big a failure this week was. It's still too fresh. I've lowered my standards this year so many times to try to keep ahold of my personal life and sanity, but I never seem to be able to lower my standards enough to feel like a success. My daily routine consists of days that are utter failures and days where I'm able to coast. I don't feel like I ever have good days. Occasionally, something good will happen, but I just can't get that excited about it. Today I had a student turn in homework today who was absent yesterday. That's one of my biggest successes all year. But then I look at the mountain of failing students and I get depressed again. I want to see them succeed so bad, but so few of them are, and I don't know how to push them and get them to work without it becoming a miserable power struggle. And I'm a pushover. That's what one of my students said I was to another teacher. And he was right. I am.

But forget all that. Forget me feeling sad about being ineffectual or watching them fail. I'm mostly sad because I realized today that I hate my job. I felt awful all week because I had several really bad days in a row, but today went fine. It was nothing great, but nothing awful either. And I just felt sick about having to go back. Every morning, I arrive at work, turn off my car and sit for about a minute reluctant to get out because I know when I do, my day will start. When lunch comes, I'm scrambling so much that I consider myself lucky the days I have a chance to eat a granola bar. When my prep period finally comes near the end of the day, I breathe a sigh of relief because I finally have a moment to sit and space out after being on call nonstop for the last several hours. When school gets out, I feel relieved that I no longer have to be on the spotlight and the low pressure work can finally begin. That's the work that isn't constant deadlines and frantically running to and fro for what feels like no results. Of course, the low pressure work has other ways of breaking my heart- when a student who has been working really hard bombs a test and I have to give them an F, and not just any F either, but a low one. Or when a student doesn't turn in homework yet again and thus digs themselves even deeper into a hole.

Then there's the extra insult that comes from your failures being altogether too public. My failures this week were of the exceptionally public kind, which leaves me feeling inferior not only in my own head, but in the minds of the people who have to decide whether or not to rehire me. No one likes to be judged, especially when they know they're going to come up wanting. Even before I started teaching, I thought I'd probably get a pink slip when those came out, but back then I thought it would get rescinded. Now I'm starting to become more and more convinced that it's going to stick. Part of me even hopes that it will so that I don't have to make the tough decision of whether or not to stay.

And then there's another part of me that gets so frustrated by the waste of it all. The waste of two years of education to get a credential. At least the masters stays with me. Then there's the waste of BTSA, the program to help beginning teachers and try to keep them from quitting. There are a lot of people trying to help me stay with this horrible profession and I appreciate their support, but I'm starting to feel guilty about wasting their time. The chances of me actually being there next year are starting to look slimmer and slimmer as I become more miserable and look even more miserable to the principal. She's going to tell me how my evaluation went on Monday, but I have a pretty good idea of what to expect. I expect she'll sugarcoat it a little (you don't want someone to know they're fired when you still have to work with them for 7 months), but I still have pretty low expectations for the whole thing. I have to. The debacle of the first evaluation was so bad and caught me so by surprise that I could barely function for the next two days. The principal mentioned offhandedly a few of the highlights and when I started to cry, she softened the blows a little and decided not to show me the notes she had taken. I shudder to think of how bad those were. If I keep my hopes low for next time, it hurts a little less.

I'm writing the most about being a failure because that's what stands out the most in my mind, but there are other aspects of my job that hurt too. I hate that it's consumed my life. I barely have time to hang out with friends, take care of my health, deal with my car that beeps deafeningly several times within my 15 minute commute because I have a leak in my coolant tank. It's been doing that for weeks. I don't have the time to fix it. Even when I set aside time to avoid work, I still think about it constantly. When someone asks what I've been up to or what's going on in my life, it's only my job. That's it. That's all my life is lately, is this horrible horrible job. It's bad to be consumed by something, but it's worse when you're being consumed by something that makes you feel awful about yourself. I hate this job. I hate it. My mom tries to cheer me up and it only makes me feel worse. She tries to tell me I'm good at what I do, but she doesn't know. She doesn't know how horribly I'm failing every day I go in. She doesn't know how miserable I feel when I have to reconcile her praise with the truth of the situation.

Ok. I'm done with this. I'm only making myself more and more miserable. I'm going to try to procrastinate and ignore my problems for a little while. They'll still be there, but I won't have to worry about them until they wake me up in the middle of the night and I can't fall back asleep (sadly, a common occurrence lately).