The Chronicles Of Nay

Good afternoon! Hope that everyone’s weekends were good! I did more movies and chilling! Just trying to enjoy the last few weeks of summer. As the short summer grows closer to an end my apprehension for the next school year grows. 

This school year has been like no other year! This was my 12th year… I think. When I first started teaching I remember teasing Heidi when I would ask her how long she had been teaching and she would say either a or b. I remember thinking how can you not remember? Well this… This is how! Haha when you teach at the same school in the same classroom and the same content for YEARS! Then they all kinda merge together! However Kathy helped me figure it out, I’m pretty sure it is 12! This year has been exhausting. On top of dealing with all of the covid crap our campus shut down. I had to pack up 12 years of my stuff and get it ready to move to another campus.

For those of you that don’t know, for the past 12 years I have taught at a campus that was just 6th grade students. Each year we had about 500 students coming to us from like 9 different elementary schools. There was a middle school not far from us that our students went to for 7th and 8th grade. Well this coming year we are combining. We will be a traditional middle school. We will have less feeder schools but we will still have almost as many kids. 

So they closed down our school and moved us into the middle school building. While we were packing up and moving out they started doing renovations to our campus in preparation to move another campus into the building. For instance they redid bathrooms, they added walls and they replaced the air conditioning unit that has given me so many problems for years. 

There are a lot of emotions that come with this move. Emotions like frustration, fear, anxiety, and excitement. I am frustrated that it took a new campus coming in for them to fix some things like the air conditioning. That might not be exactly what happened but that is what it looks like.  Fear and anxiety come in because this coming year has a lot of unknown, and anyone that knows me knows that I don’t like that! I like to be in control. I like to know what is going on! However, probably the biggest emotion I am feeling right now is that I am excited. Perhaps because the things that are making me anxious also excite me about the situation. It will be a new year with new experiences. I will have new coworkers and opportunities that I didn’t have before. I will have someone to share the yearbook burden with. I will have the opportunity to see my students grow. I will have a new room and space to make my own. I know that I had become comfortable with the way things were. I know that being pushed out of my comfort zone will allow me to grow. I know all of these things but it doesn’t make it any easier to just be sitting here waiting for the year to start! Haha 

Like I said there are good things that come with the move and the new school year. I know that I have become very comfortable. Not only with my teaching but also my room was decorated in a mostly the same way every year. I will be working with new people this year. Working with new people will allow me to push and maybe change some of my lessons that I have been doing the same way. It also gives me a new audience to share some of the things that have been going well in my classroom for the last few years. So I decided that this year I am going to continue to decorate my room with bright colors like I do! However I am also going to add in some llamas! I have started getting some stuff ready.  

One of the things I will miss from my old room is all the windows. I don’t like the overhead lights that make my room feel very much like a hospital room! So if anyone has any lamps laying around that they don’t want anymore I would love to put them to use in my classroom! I have also created an amazon wish list of some stuff that I would love to have in my room. If any one is just dying to help out I will link my wish list here! I would be grateful for any help but completely understand if you don’t want to or can’t.

I know that this year is going to be a challenge. There is a lot of new, a lot of unknown and a lot of different. However, I am ready! I am excited for the new, for the different and for that unknown to become the normal. I am just ready for everything to start already! I think the worst part of it all is the anticipation of it all. I will for sure keep y’all updated once everything gets started and going.