This Time of Year

Teachers bellyache about their jobs a lot, but in many ways it's an incredibly sweet gig.  I'm just now wrapping up my two-month summer vacation.  That's right, suckers, two months.  I'll be starting back to work in just a couple of weeks, and the strange thing is...

I'm sort of looking forward to it.

Don't misunderstand me; I really love my time off, and I've squeezed the juice out of every minute.  If the governor announced they were extending vacation an additional month, I'd be like whoop-de-doo.

Nevertheless.

I'm sort of looking forward to going back.

I can tell this because I start having dreams about being in the classroom.  These are pleasant dreams, not very interesting, but pleasant.  Mostly I'm teaching the same stuff I taught last year, only I'm doing a better job.  For example, last year I did a lot of work teaching my students to use parallelism and appositives to jazz up their writing.  And it worked, too.  Maybe too well.  They started using too much damn parallelism and too damn many appositives.  So this year, I'm going to do more to emphasize other sentence techniques.  For example, balanced sentences. I interrupted writing this blog to read an article on balanced sentences, picturing how I'd incorporate them in the classroom.  I get all quivery just thinking about it.

Clearly I must be sick.

But I'm sort of looking forward to going back.