April is Indeed the Unkindest Month, and May Just Sucks
“Why aren’t you in a better mood? It’s almost summer?”
Yeah, but it’s NOT summer yet. It’s that liminal time of year that teachers know and loathe: late April and May. Sure, we’re thisclose to being able to pee whenever we want and to taking more than fifteen minutes to eat our lunch, but we still have to get through the last weeks. And they’re pretty awful.
First, there are the students themselves. I love my kids. I really do. I call them “my” kids without any irony. It’s been eight months since we started working together, and I’m in. I’m invested. I’ve carefully served up my metaphorical Kool-Aid and kept a poker face while internally high-fiving myself while I watched them gulp it down, ready and willing to follow me through the curriculum. In the weeks after we got back from Spring Break, however, they lose their minds. I get questions I haven’t heard since I laid my first set of stink eyes on them during the first couple of weeks of school.
“Is this for a grade?” Have I not emphasized the beauty of learning for the sake of learning every single day? And, yes, I “count” everything whether that’s explicit or not.
“What are we doing?” I literally just went over the directions.
