"Just thought you should know that your 6th period is worried about you"

Friday was officially my first mental health day that I've taken off this year. This was in direct response to probably the shittiest week yet - horrible student behavior, horrible test scores, and many silent drives to and from work. Having had essentially a three day weekend now to cool off, I've realized that it's all relative to my expectations for what my class should look like. Both the behavior and the test scores weren't as bad as last year, so that's a plus, but having seen the improvements that we've made in our Algebra classes, it's so depressing to feel like these kids are slowly starting to fall back into the familiar routine from last year. I feel like I've been doing WAY more for them this year, and because of that I think this past week I was feeling personally offended that the students weren't appreciating any of that extra work.

Now I didn't tell them that of course, but I'm no good at concealing emotion, so it should come as no surprise that my substitute sent me a text on Friday saying that my 6th period class voluntarily wrote me an apology letter because they were worried about me. I have yet to read it, but it's nice realizing that the kids don't actually TRY to ruin teachers' lives, unless of course they actually don't like them at all.

Tomorrow is a crucial day. Now that my students know that I pretty much took a day off because of them, I have to play my cards very carefully. We are resetting classroom rules tomorrow to be very explicit in what the consequences are, and if they ask, last week was last week. Nothing more about it. I think I'm going to have to smile a little less this week to get the point across that learning is top priority. New seating arrangement, new seating chart, new unit. Let's start fresh.

Too bad we'll just have to start fresh all over again after the holiday break.