Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Remember when you were a kid, and Sunday was the day you loved/hated? Because it was still technically the weekend, but by Sunday night you knew you had to Get Ready for School Tomorrow. Well, I think I have that now. The back-to-work clock is ticking, and my time at home is running out. 

I think this "end-of-summer blahs" teachers get should be called something. We work hard, we should have our own syndrome to quantify this lovely/terrible time when the summer sand is running down the hourglass at ever-increasing speed. I would like to propose Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

I think it's appropriate. Here's why: 

Before the kids ever darken the school's doorway - for One. Solid. Week! - we teachers are already back to work. And let me tell you, much of what we do to prepare for the school year is dreadful. Meetings upon meetings upon meetings. Hour after hour of training. (Why IS it that, though we teachers are supposed to inspire our students, to give them hands-on learning opportunities, we can't seem to give our colleagues the same respect? WHY, I ask you, would anyone in the education profession ever feel the need to read straight from the powerpoint for the meeting - and then, give everyone a hard copy of that same powerpoint so they can follow along? If that's how they taught, wouldn't they get fired?) 

So, we have endless, boring meetings, punctuated by frantic rewriting of your syllabus because of massive curricula revisions (We have new standards! Everything is different now - everything! What you used to use, you now have to get rid of, because Administration cannot ever see those horrible, useless learning objectives that we used last year ever again!). 

It gets super fun when you have to move your classroom. This is like playing the worst game of Jenga in the universe: just when you get everything to fit, it falls apart. Only in the teacher's case, those Jenga blocks are stratified layers of collected teaching tools, articles, data folders, art supplies, books and sundry teacher-y things, miscellaneous cabinets, shelves, stackable storage drawers, and your actual big old wooden ornate desk you got off Craigslist that takes a team of horses or a very motivated football player to move even half an inch. It's almost as bad as moving into a new apartment. And, since every classroom in existence was built by the Old Spice "Worst Architect in the World" guy, it's terrible to move from the relative comfort of your old quirky room (that, after five years, you've managed to Jenga everything to make a workable space) into the unknown territory of a new quirky room. Those floor lamps you were using to light up that dark corner in your old room? Now you get no outlets! Muahahahaha! 

Moving your classroom is bad, but moving into a new school building as a new teacher is worse. Teachers poach. An empty classroom is like blood in the water for sharks: teachers can smell it a mile away, and they won't stop till they get what they want. And what they want is....all that cool stuff the retiring Social Studies teacher left behind in her classroom. It all belongs to the school anyway, so no one needs to get their dander up. But still. This makes it hard for the new teacher on campus. You will arrive to find your student desks are all broken, you have no teacher desk, no tables, no cabinets or shelves, and your overhead projector works only if you jiggle it every two minutes. 

Then there's making copies. My goodness. Schools are probably the single worst contributor to global warming, since we are responsible for killing all the trees to make paper. Before the kids get back we have to make about a million copies of a thousand different things that for some reason have to go home RIGHT AWAY, the first week. It's an avalanche of paperwork. You will also have to ask for much of this paperwork back, so you can file it away (remember - you need file folders - you don't have any since your room was poached) but you usually never look at it again, unless the counselor comes by to say, "Hey, did you get the 504 on the Jones kid in 2nd period?....I need it back, that was the old version. But I promise I'll get you the new one tomorrow."). As a parent I hate the beginning-of-year paper deluge, and my students' parents, I know, are just the same. Which is maybe why some (most? a lot? too much?) of the paper we send home never really makes it back. We will spend hours pointlessly making copies.

Generally speaking, teachers and copy machines have a love/hate relationship. We love them when they work for us, but they're terrible when they get jammed or they run out of ink (and the school isn't getting any more ink till the end of next week: thank you, bureaucrats). I spent many an hour making copies. Sometimes it's refreshing to have a mindless task to distract you from the otherwise crushing reality of the papers you'll be grading all weekend instead of, I don't know, spending your off time hanging with your family or having any sort of life at all. But there are times when making copies is terrible. When there's a line and you're in a hurry. When you have to run the copies for your department, but the math people got there first and now you have to wait two hours before their stuff gets done. When the school is out of paper. (Thank you, state legislators, for absolutely and completely screwing up school funding for the past several years. No, don't worry about it, we don't really need paper!) 

So with all this stuff hanging over our heads - meetings, syllabus revising, overhauled curricula, training, moving your stuff into a new classroom, making copies - we should get to claim Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

It's the thing that makes you seriously question why you got into education in the first place, that makes you want to run very far away in the opposite direction of your school. 

Oh, and apparently, I'm not the only teacher who's been thinking about teacher training lately.