This is the end.

This is it--my final week of freedom. I hate to use the cliché, but this summer has flown by awfully fast. Conspiracy Hobo Teacher is thinking that the district is shaving off days of summer break ever so discretely. There's a day knocked off the beginning, one dropped from the end, little by little, until BAM--no more summer break. I half expect that the administration will slip a mickey into the punch bowl at the next end of the year party, only for them to revive us a few hours later, telling us to hurry and get to our classrooms because students will be arriving tomorrow for the first day of school. Then, we would stager off in all different directions, mumbling, not knowing any better.

"Class--rules--not--done."
"My bulletin board..."
"Must--make--seating--chart"

But let's focus on this year...

I call this my full moon week because I feel this change inside of me. Slowly, I get these ideas growing in my head.

This year I will grade every single journal entry that my 180 kids write.

This year I will revamp all of my test and quizzes.

This year, if a stick steadfast to grading 10 papers a day, then I'll never have to stay up late grading.

That's right, I'm morphing back into a teacher. Not just any teacher, but a wide-eyed, optimistic, ignorant teacher. For some reason, summer always serves as some kind of a reboot. By the end of it, any memory of the previous school year is wiped away. Gone are the ridiculous parents' emails. Gone are the countless, "Are we doing anything today?" 60 hour work weeks? Nah, I didn't do that. All of that is picked clean from my brain, only to later grow back stronger than the year before.

What's with me associating teaching with blackouts? That can't be good.