First Confession ...

For months I have been looking for a place for me to record my thoughts. The tumultuous haze that my life has become has almost left me breathless at every moment, yet as I let it all pass by unrecorded I feel like I am doing myself such a disservice, if not only to record my failings in my first year as a World History teacher in Baltimore City. The only thing more painful than the daily gauntlet of mistakes and pulsating reality of my inadequacy as a teacher is the fact that I would submit myself to repeat the same painful lessons by not documenting this experience in some way shape or form. 

So this will hopefully become a place where I can rest my troubles on a proverbial raft and float them out to sea, only to be picked up by some Russian cod fisherman and ravaged according to their filthy fancies. 

My confession up to this point is that I have initiated a sadistic and bizarre experiment in self-sabotage during my first few weeks as a teacher.  Rather than simply distribute the textbooks the first day, and begin a typical high school world history course like any other teacher, let alone a new teacher, I somehow became asphyxiated with the notion of independently choreographing some sort of "bridge unit" - to chaperone my students on an enlightening sojourn from the dirty crevices of prehistory until the time when my modern world history textbook begins, so as to honor the necessity of historical continuity for these 9th graders that will most likely purge 99% of any knowledge of material we cover as fast as it takes to inhale a deep breath of nitrous oxide out of a lonely whip-it purchase.  

And that decision has made my first month teaching an absolute hell.

Not to mention, it has stolen most all of my time, as I frantically throw together fragments of disparate lessons to have some sort of history-oriented material to throw at my students.  As a result, I've all but entirely ignored my grade book, which at 3 weeks in, has yet to even be properly set up.  That is a task for this weekend, along with creating a test to give to my students to assess their knowledge of my bastard-child, severely mentally challenged of a frankenstienien first world history unit that I have posthumously named "Introductions to History".  Perhaps I should have named it "The Shape of Introductions of History to Come" because of its revolutionary disjointed, abstractly holistic core, which all but taunts my students with a tortuously elusive relevance.

Well that is enough for tonight.  I have to sit down and decide how the hell I am going to score these piles of assignments I have collected from my students.  It reminds me of doing taxes.  I think this is the time where I start to make serious adjustments to how many assignments I'm going to collect, grade, and give back.