School Begins Again

I have this anxiety problem every August before school begins again. I go through all of these issues about who I really wanted to be in life, what I believe I should be doing with my "gifts," whether or not today's youth even cares about learning, and so on. Lots of depressing, end of days type of stuff. Every year. I know it's coming and I try to counteract it with reason, but the depressive side of my brain apparently has no reason.

So all during the last week of August I was thinking about the futility of life as I plunge into another year of teaching thankless youths about things they don't care about. And all this past week, I was teaching the thankless youths the things they don't care about. Only, it wasn't that bad. In fact, the class I was dreading the most because I haven't taught it in two years has actually been one of the most entertaining.

We have to start at the root of fiction: plot, conflict, character, etc. So it starts off slowly and usually kind of boringly. The students roll their eyes generally and pretend I'm forcing them to learn about their grandparents' love life.

But this time, I tried to do the plot review a little differently, and they seemed to enjoy it. In past years, I've made them read the story to themselves because they're still scared enough that they'll do what I ask and will read and not talk. Later in the trimester, I always have to resort to the CD to keep them from ignoring the assignment and to have a fighting chance of getting them to do the follow-up assignments.

This time I read them the first five pages of the story and stopped whenever I thought something interesting had happened that they might not have noticed. We anticipated what would happen next, we made assumptions about the main character and his antagonist, we questioned the sanity of both. It was fun. And what's more, most of them seemed to think it was fairly fun, too. They were listening and answering questions.

Needless to say, my anxiety has digressed a bit. I'm relatively happy with my work again. I saw a bunch of students I'd missed over the summer. Things are going all right.