t-minus 36 hours

Classes start on Wednesday! Wild.

My co-teacher and I have been getting our room set up, hunting down desks (37, and yes, that's how big our classes are) and putting up posters. Today I was at school all day for a parent-student open house, where they could just drop in and meet teachers in their classrooms. Right now our rosters have about 110 kids in three classes, give or take. I met close to 30 students and/or parents today, which isn't a huge percentage of 110 but is still a lot of names and faces. Especially when I'm trying to remember their names phonetically and then match them to the names on my roster as soon as they leave the room.

A lot of parents told me how they really wanted their child to focus this year, how this was the year they were really going to ride them to do their homework, that kind of thing. One kid's mom talked about how much they really wanted him to go to college, and how much he reads at home, and how important this class was to them as they're trying to transition him out of self-contained classes, and this will be his only mainstream class this year. She told me that right now they (I took "they" to mean guidance counselors) were pushing him towards a community college, but that he really was smart and wanted to go to a real four-year school. They were both very talkative, and the kid started telling me about what books he'd read, "Where the Red Fern Grows," and "The Giver," and all the Harry Potter books except the last one but he's almost finished with it and can't wait to see the movie. So... my job just got a lot more real. My job now is to get him ready to go to college. Or as ready as we can get him in one year-long class. And we've got 109 other kids, and 109 more jobs to figure out. It's a little (read: a lot) overwhelming, but when I get stressed and exhausted and totally spent in the next few months, I'll need to remind myself that there are actual people with actual futures sitting in our classroom. And that their futures are now my job.