Your mood is always....LOVE!

I am a first year teacher.

This is my first year ever.

I mean, I did a lot of teaching related things in college, and took semesters off to teach abroad, and tried very hard to get as much experience as possible,
but still.

I have my own classroom
and 17 beautiful little people whose intellectual growth I am responsible for...
and man, it is overwhelming sometimes.

I think about these kids all the time. Like, when I'm falling asleep at night, this will pop in my head: "Oh, crap. Jacob*'s penmanship is horrible and I forgot to make copies of those handwriting pages." Or "If Suzie's mom doesn't send back a reading slip tomorrow, I am seriously going to lose it!"

The first week I went back after my maternity leave, all I could think about was getting home to my baby. But when one of my students very sincerely and earnestly asked me what a toothbrush was, instead of going straight home after school to rock my baby, I went to the store to buy a toothbrush. And I cried in the car as I drove past my house.

It may not seem like a lot, but I try, every day, to make sure I'm doing the very absolute best I can for them. Sometimes, I may feel frustrated. I always am hoping they can't tell when I'm at the end of my rope.

On Thursday, my smartboard was malfunctioning. I had an awesome smartboard lesson all ready to go for my math lesson, and I was just about to tell those kiddos to pull out a book while I fixed the board when my vice principal walked in for an informal evaluation. Yippee!

So I just...winged it. Wung it. You know. Just went with it. It ended up going really well, but this was the highlight, probably of my whole month.

One of my little math stress-cases (seriously, this student has major anxiety issues when it comes to math, and we have been slowly but surely working on them. I even do breathing exercises to help!) was working through a problem, and I was coaching this kiddo through it, and she finally arrived at the right answer. I highfived her and just before I was about to walk away, she leaped out of her chair, flung her arms around me, and said:

"Mrs. Blair....your mood is always....LOVE!"

I almost cried. Truly.

I think it's probably the best compliment I've ever received.