happy birthday...now back to work (paradoxes of life)

Now that it is past midnight, I guess I am officially 29 years old. Sheesh. Thirty minus 1. In some ways, it feels old. Other ways, young. For instance, when I realize that my sixth grade students this year were born at about the same time I was graduating from high school, I feel old. But when I talk to my neighbor who has sons my age, I feel young. When I realize that I've lived for nearly a third of a century, old. When I talk to the 105-year-old lady and her 80-year-old daughter at the nursing home where we visit with our small group, young. When I get a haircut and see more gray hair than brown, old. Life's pretty cool that way. We get to walk through life with people from all stages of life; those ahead and those behind, sharing our experiences and trying to teach and learn all at the same time.

At any rate, one week from today, I head back to work. I always get bittersweet feelings around this time of year. I enjoy my job, so I look forward to starting a new year. In fact, that's the best part of teaching. I get a fresh start every year to fix mistakes and capitalize on improvements I made in the previous year. I've got some great ideas to make life easier this year and I'm looking forward to giving them a shot. However, I must say that I enjoy not having to handle the drama of sixth-grade life during the summer. But I've been feeling a sense that this year will be different. I've been feeling like I really need to focus on extending extra gobs of grace to my students and coworkers this year. I also hope to get a stronger start since I'm not the new guy at my school this year and I have a pretty good lay of the land.

But having said that, this year I'll be teaching all math. And if you know me well, you know how crazy that is. I majored in journalism and I love writing (thus the blog). Math for me growing up was not too hard, I just didn't like it. I co-taught last year with a great teacher and thankfully got a crash course in teaching math. And doubly thankfully, I'm coteaching with her for two classes again this year so I can copy all of her good ideas. Triply thankfully, we're talking sixth grade, special education math, and not algebra 2 or trig. It should be fun (in some kind of weird, ironic, surreal kind of way).