First year summary/Summer of bureaucracy

I find it interesting that at the end of last year, my first year of teaching, I felt some sort of pressure to eloquently summarize the lessons learned from my first year of teaching, but I don't think I'm going to do it. Instead I will spend my precious summer time rewatching the entire wire series with my wife (1st time for her... welcome to balmore), finding a good used car for my family, and listlessly working at North Ave at the headquarters of Baltimore City Public Schools. If anything, the latter has likely numbed my senses for whatever expectation I had for a summer full of achievement and thoughtful reflection in preparation for my second year of teaching.

I have casually accumulated a simple list of thoughts that summarize my first year:

• I learned that I love teaching and know that eventually I will become the kind of teacher that I would like to be.
• I am thoroughly sobered and humbled by what it takes to be a good teacher, and the efforts of the amazing teachers that I have the privilege to work with.
• Next year is going to be much more fun - and much harder in many ways.
  

On a more puzzling note, I have had the opportunity to work this summer at City Schools HQ, a monolith of bureaucratic insanity and statistical worship. I've even had the chance to meet some of the top dogs, who, in all honesty, are less dissapointing than most I've met there. The building has a sort of invisible ectoplasmic aura surrounding it, almost like in Ghostbusters 2. All those who enter into its inner chambers will experience of the sadness, political manuevering, raw gossip, and desparate insecurity that give the monolith's invisible forcefield such a healthy, thick, shiny, pulsating quality.