Bruised, battered, and back at blogging

Daniel Miller: Where were you? I'm just curious.
Bob Diamond: I'd tell you, but you wouldn't understand.
Daniel Miller: Don't treat me like a moron. Try me.
Bob Diamond: I was trapped near the inner circle of fault.
Daniel Miller: I don't understand.
Bob Diamond: I told you...

Defending Your Life (1991)

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When I think about how to explain my 9-month hiatus from blogging, this dialogue from that very clever movie immediately came to mind.

I have not had the easiest time at work these last two school years.  By January of this year, when I last blogged, the situation was so bad at my school that the teaching staff (including me) was on the brink of mutiny.  Discipline had totally broken down, students were roaming the halls banging on doors and telling teachers to go fuck themselves; our administration was MIA and not doing anything punitive to these miscreants; our principal ended up getting canned; we teachers ended up having a couple venting sessions with the district superintendent himself as he attempted to stop the proverbial bleeding.

Summer 2014 mercifully arrived, and I began to consider blogging again, but I was so emotionally exhausted from the school year just ended, that I couldn't even bring myself to log in.  Not to mention, the family and I hit the Interstate in July for an almost month-long road trip that took us through 20 states on the way to Indiana and back, so opportunities to blog were few and far between anyway.

Once this school year started, I have been underwater from the start.  Discipline-wise, things started out promisingly, but it is all beginning to break down quickly, as our student body has figured out that our new principal is as hesitant to enforce the rules as the previous one.  Not to mention that our new principal and one of our vice principals both have a blatantly low opinion of us teachers, and they are not afraid to show it, which has led to a lot of bad blood and a non-existent feeling of support from the administration.

Add to that the imposition of Common Core and a new academic curriculum at my site for which we are all in constant training, and this school year is looking to be more and more a rerun of last school year.

Nevertheless, with all that going on, more and more lately, I have been reading and experiencing things that caused that little voice in my head to pipe up with, "Ooooh, that would make a great blog post!"

I think its time to make that happen.