Hula-Hoop Hatred

It was a dim, chilly evening. I had just arrived home, from a day of unrest. He was exhausted from an even longer day of turmoil and strife. Yet we found ourselves entertained with exhilarating, stomach aching fun…. We were watching America’s Funniest Home Videos. The winner that evening was a 18 month boy who could hula hoop with the best of them. It was incredible. It was almost like driving past a horrific car accident. You know you should look away, but you just can’t. I felt weird, gawking at this baby for so long, but I couldn’t turn away.

How’s that for a preamble to a vent session?
Hula hoops….hoops…..school….torture!

I just finished my last semester of formal schooling. The next 5 months will be consumed with no time for family. No time for fun. No time for church….ok maybe I can make time for church, but my time will be utterly devoted to teaching your children….for free! You’re welcome. That topic is for a different time. This is an assertion of my own, and others can chime in as they please, hatred of hoops. Hoops we must jump, hop, crawl, and dive through, to earn that expensive piece of paper that will be glamorously framed and tossed in a box in the basement for decades to come.
My house has been void of cleanliness, food, and milk for the past 2 weeks. My bedroom floor has been festooned with recycled paper with assessments, formal and summative, plastered over its surface. Lesson plans haunt me in my dreams; students appear from smoke with horns protruding through their craniums, and my own thoughts are so sporadic, I am fortunate if I don’t wear the same outfit two days in a row.
12/1/10… A week before the day that will live in infamy, is a day far from infamy for me. It was on this day, I turned in my last assignment before I will be student teaching, and let me tell you what!, it was quite….uneventful. I thought it would be more thrilling, but it wasn’t. I have jumped through all the hoops….and there were a lot….and I still don’t have a sense of gratification. Maybe it will come in 5 months, but as of yet, all those stupid assignments, papers, lesson plans that are so detailed, there is no way to use them in my actual teaching, observations, reflections and anything else I spent my time doing, have been in the way and I am glad to have the majority out of sight and out of mind.
Yet as my anger subsides, I have realized that those damn hoops weren’t as bad as I thought and I may actually use some of those assignments in my near future….some of them. Still I stand by my original argument, most of what I spent doing the past 5 years has been, “You tell me to jump, and I ask you how high.” I am glad it’s near it’s end.