Mama said there'd be days like this

Today is one of those days when I stayed at school until 7pm grading and then planning tomorrow's lesson and things still don't feel right. I feel like things I've done for years did not work as well as I remember and will not work well this year. I'm rethinking and retooling old assignments, and am on the verge of blowing up my entire unit in favor of things that might work better and starting from scratch. But I'm still married a bit to past ideas and ideals. So instead of blowing it up, I'm sort of treading water, plugging in holes, going day by day while I think about it some more, turning it over in my head until things feel right. I feel like I have hours of planning to go before I can go in there tomorrow, but I've got to get to Staples before it closes. And I didn't work out this morning because I got home so late last night, so I really want to head to Bally's tonight. It would probably be a good thing to clear my head, anyway.

Meanwhile, I stay at school until 7pm, and the thanks I get in my mailbox is a notice from administration listing all the teachers who gave $5 to the PTSA during the faculty meeting the other day. They hope to have all of us donate by Thursday. It was very clearly a public humiliation tactic against those of us who did give the $5. The thing is, I haven't been paid since June. Sorry, man, but until I know I can make my car payment on the 15th, I'm not going to be giving money away. I have school supplies to buy still, and that's much more important for my students' success than $5 to the PTA so they can buy meat subs for all the teachers during Teacher Appreciation Week and have no lunch at all for the fifteen vegetarian teachers. I haven't even made my Red Cross donation yet, and won't until I do get paid - this Friday. I almost wrote them back a note stating that this sort of public denouncement of not donating sucks, especially when teachers haven't been paid since June. Not to mention the $405 that the district still owes me for the plane tickets and training I went to this summer, that I was told I'd be reimbursed for in July. I was told that it was a Southern Baptist thing to publicly list amounts that people donate, which in my school sort of translates to "it's a black thing." Because everything connects back to To Kill a Mockingbird, I thought of the Reverend Sykes scene in the church, when he locks in the parishoners until they raise $10 for Helen Robinson and her kids. And the mockingbird reference made me feel better about it all. But the public humiliation for not donating still sort of sucks.