The Slow Process of Going Insane

I can feel it. This week ends the honeymoon stage of the new school year. Why you ask? I can't quite put my finger on it - it could be the recent realization that despite my endless hours teaching adding and subtracting negative numbers, about a third of my Algebra students still have no idea what the hell they are doing. Of course it could also be due to the building frustration with our sluggish Precalculus pace, begging an answer to how we will ever cover all the necessary material before the year is up. Then again, getting a 38th student in my Geometry class today pretty much pushed me over the edge, because with only room for 37 desks in class, this new addition has now made it near impossible to implement an effective seating chart.

If you recall, last year I had 41 students in one of my Geometry classes, but fortunately - or unfortunately, however you look at it - since it was a class entirely of sophomores, juniors, and seniors, I rarely had more than 30 students at a time. Comparatively speaking, it was perfectly manageable. The blessing/curse complex this year is having great attendance but too many bodies in the classroom at once. Generally speaking, 9th graders taking Geometry are very school-oriented and self-motivated, and these students are the ones you can count on to be at school every day, so my 5th period is always packed. I tell you - trying to teach 37 sugar-charged 14 year-olds immediately after lunch is driving me crazy. And the danger is that when that happens, the iffy teaching practices come out. Today, fed up and exhausted, I invited my more vocal student to the overhead to teach us how to do the problem and when he started talking, I started making annoyingly loud noises and interrupted him at every other word, and told him that that was how I felt EVERY DAY. We then went into a discussion about how hard it is to demonstrate a math concept when a student interrupts with a new random question every ten seconds. Because no Jada, I am not married, no Cynthia, I do not have any kids, no Raul, I do not have any lead for your mechanical pencil, and no Arturo, I did not see what Armando just did to you. My god.