Naked (Real Talk) [Teaching&Blog]

Naked (Real Talk)

In the song “Naked” off her first album, Avril Lavigne sang the following lyrics

I wake up in the mornin’/Put on my face/The one that’s gonna get me
Through another day/Doesn’t really matter/How I feel inside
This life is like a game sometimes

Then you came around me/The walls just dissappeared
Nothin’ to surround me/Keep me from my fears
I’m unprotected/See how I’ve opened up-/
You’ve made me trust

Cause I’ve never felt like this before?I’m naked around you
Does it show??You see right through me
And I can’t hide?I’m naked around you
And it feels so right

Everything that I feel about my life, and the way things have been going lately, I wish would ideally fit into those lyrics, but I can’t say it does.   Yes, I’m pretty naked, rather feeling kind of raw  more so.  I have no shame about my rollercoaster  emotions, as of late.  The hiring freeze hasn’t been lifted for NYC public schools and thus, I’m still stuck in this world of Per-diem substituting.  Once again, it’s now the time of year where I’ve put my foot down, and have told myself that I would only take jobs from a certain school that I have been at for several days a week for several months now.  My adopted home base, per se.  The kids know me.  Most of the staff knows my face, if not my name.   I don’t feel like a temp by the company soda machine.  I can sit in the teacher’s lounge and not feel like an alien, or drive myself crazy feeling judge on my attire by those full time employees in the same room.  At my adopted school of this year,  lately I’ve been doing a lot of CTT classes, where my own opinions and knowledge were actually solicited by the lead teacher.  I kind of feel like I belong.

Except for days like yesterday, when the Subcentral phone system kept calling with the most obscure job offers, in the most far away places.  Why would I really want to go deal with potty mouthed  ESL children in Queens or Brooklyn when  a mere 6-15 minute walk nearby is where I want to be.  And this place is so awesome because it’s a place where it seems like someone, teacher or student,  is always absent.  However, around the 5th non-choice school phone call from the system that I declined, I realized that my school, and both its both early and late sessions had started, and that there would be no more phone calls for the morning, and that I had given myself a voluntary day off. Which actually hurts a lot because of the weird payroll schedule that they have Per Diem workers on.  And I realized that I had just screwed myself into having to literally budget in the economic and emotional cost of not seeing my kids.  Because make no mistake, those are my kids now.

They know that if I’m subbing that I have my magic portfolio of assignments (a lot teachable moments too) that can fit in.  They get that only one kid at a time is going to the bathroom, and that when I hear curse words, they should expect to hear me call out “LANGUAGE!”  And they know that even if it’s busy work, I’m still collecting the work and will leave a note for their absent teacher.  Those are now my kids.
But the problem with that being is…I can’t fiscally afford to hope and pray that the right school is going to call me, and miss other opportunities.  However, at the same time, I know I can’t afford the mental and emotional heart ache it is to have yet another day of school (in the last days of the year,mind you) in a place where I’m just sort of there.  Like the elephant on the coffee table.  I also can’t take the feeling of wondering if I’ll be back at this school.  I’ve got notes and notes of what schools were good to me, and which ones made me search for a key to the rest room.

And as with so  many things in my life, I kind of wonder…What do I do?

[Chester Kent.]

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