For those not familiar with the pay schedules of teaching, “summer pay” is an optional phenomenon that causes the paychecks to be smaller during the school year, but they keep coming over the summer. Summer break here is essentially two months; so, since I’ve worked through a little more than half of the year, I’ve earned a little more than an extra month’s worth of money.

When a teacher leaves mid-year, they don’t have to wait for summer to get summer pay–it just comes to them. So, my next two paychecks will come as scheduled, although they’ll be a little bigger than usual (heck yeah) and I’ll have a little bit of breathing room in which to get money coming in from something else. Which is probably a good thing, because I didn’t get much of anything done on that yesterday or the day before because the “do stuff” hamster in my brain just didn’t get on the wheel.

Long story short, work got to me.  I went in with enthusiasm but not a lot of energy, and it chewed me up.  Some of it is confidential.  Some of it I just don’t want to talk about.  I will say this…I still think I can teach and do well at it, somewhere else; and, for all the stuff I had a hard time with, I feel that there were things I had going for me that weren’t valued as much as they should have been.

So, I’m being released from my contract.  In theory I’m going to sub and find a part-time job.  In practice, hard to say.

Today, the job search began again. I got around to, final count, 7 different districts, to pick up the paperwork.  Tomorrow I need to take as many of those back as I can and get around to a few more.

I also got my personal belongings from the classroom…which sucked.  A few of my students were there–really decent kids, who I’ll miss.  Hopefully some of them will stay in touch, though it hasn’t happened yet.  Everyone was so nice; I almost fell apart.

Life is going to be extremely crazy for the next several months.  Subbing, some other kind of job (maybe working in a bookstore or tutoring), putting myself back together.  Preferably keeping the rest of it from falling apart.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

The other thing I don’t need: A new hobby/addiction. A friend mentioned Worth1000.com, so I started poking around. And then found a beginner contest that looked interesting, signed up, threw together an entry…found another one…stayed up a little too late last night outlining puzzle pieces and putting light and shadows on things to make this…which would be fine, over summer 2008 when I’ll have critical choices to make like “mountains or beach,” but less than a month before I have to have everything ready for oral exams, way less than a month before my second work sample is due, and when I still need to do some paperwork so that I’ll have the job next year (and maybe even get ahold of that apartment I was looking at)…yeah…a new timewaster is the LAST thing I need right now. And yet.

Apparently this is spammity spam spam from Spamalot.  Grr.

Apparently this isn’t spam:

Even though this is:

I’m not worried about “them” monitoring my e-mail. If they were doing that, they’d do a better job of it.

Anyway…yeah. Need to talk to the Arizona Department of Education, about how to make this legal. But I think I’ll be OK one way or another.

It’s not complicated.  I’m tired from 5 hours being an average night (the other night, I had a chance for almost 8 uninterrupted hours–spontaneously woke up and interrupted it, six and a half hours in).  I’m fighting depression off again because of the lack of sleep and the pressure of having to not screw it up now when I’m this close.  I’m feeling overwhelmed by having to get all the finishing-up stuff right in such a tight timetable to be able to teach in the district that wants me.

I’m running out of energy even for myself.  I’m dragging myself through because it’s almost over.  Yeah, I’m less enthusiastic, it’s called being dead tired.

They made useful comments like “you’ve got to take care of yourself.”  There’s only so much time in the day and almost every minute goes toward school–or at least trying to do school stuff, I’m so scattered that I fall into other things and don’t even realize it–I just can’t imagine being able to fit anything else in, since for anything that goes in something’s got to fall out.  If I had an hour a day for “me time” I’d sleep more.

They said that they wouldn’t be surprised if I were to break down and cry, that in fact they’d be more surprised if I hadn’t up to that point.  Now, there were a few tears, but “cry” is a strong word…I felt like it…I’ve felt like it before…but…yeah, I’m controlled.  I will not break. For all I know that’s part of the problem, but it just is what it is.  I’ve already used my quota of crying as a student.  Couldn’t explain that; they know, to some extent, since I couldn’t keep the whole thing a secret, but almost no one knows how much that still gets to me, so when they asked if I knew what was wrong, I just couldn’t come up with anything that was true and let me keep trying not to talk about it.

Dangit, my throat’s sore again now, from thinking about it.  Something in me still tries to say I can’t do it.  Ridiculous…I know I can do it, I just have to drag myself through this, get to it.  But it’s there, it’s a thought in my head, I can’t make it go away even though I refuse to give in to it.  So it makes every day a struggle and I don’t know how to change that.

And they asked what they could do to help.  The thing is, there just isn’t a whole lot anyone can do, unless they can make my life make sense, put an extra four hours in each day so that I can sleep and breathe, and cook and clean for me so I don’t have to think about that stuff.  I’m not from a teaching family, I’m not even from a normal family, no one gets it and almost no one even knows how to listen.  I’ve got pretty much no one outside of school to bounce stuff off of or to look to for an example.

So, I’m fitting in a doctor’s appointment on Friday, to rule out physical causes, since they said I should do that.  I doubt it’s anything that’ll show up in that sort of thing, it’s that I haven’t had a term off since 2001 and have been running up a sleep debt since sophomore year and deliberately made it worse in spring of junior year.  I doubt they have a pill for that.  But, whatever.

Here’s the official announcement: I’ve signed and returned the letter of intent for this school district. (Yes, it’s in Arizona. I’m going to Arizona!) I don’t have my specific assignment yet but they’ve got me down tentatively for 7th or 8th grade math. All that stressing over figuring out what I really wanted, and I ended up going with the first district that asked…and making that decision in the car on my way home from the school, just based on a realization, probably influenced by research that filtered together, that it just feels right. So, we’ll see. If I don’t turn out to like it there for whatever reason, I can always go somewhere else next year; it’s a letter of intent, not selling myself into slavery.

So, what do the two have to do with each other? New teacher orientation for the Pendergast School District starts on July 23. (Two weeks of paid non-student days so I can breathe a little, get my feet under me, and write lesson plans, wheeee!) Today is April 23. So, today, I begin a three-month countdown.

I have so much stuff to take care of and figure out about moving. So much to do in the next three months. Give notice on current apartment. Arrange for utilities to be shut off. GET a forwarding address.

It’s crazy. A tiny bit scary, even. But it’s so close to being real.

I made a ticker for it and everything:

Also, I’ve got one other definite job offer on the table, and a few others with varying degrees of interest…I’m so glad I decided to go for middle school math, since I’m getting a ton of interest based on it. And interviewing is not as hard as I thought it was going to be.

It’s somewhere in the range of 4-5 months from really being real. Wow.