I Picked the Wrong Night to Start a Blog

If I remind you that this blog is being created at 11:30 pm on November 5, Election Night, and I add that I am a Farmington teacher, that might be all you think you need to get a grasp of the title of this post. My spirits have at other times been higher. But the truth is, I do not feel that this is a bad night to begin, at all. It's probably the wrong night only in the sense that I should have started many nights ago. 

I've never blogged, before. It will be very interesting to me to learn whether anyone besides me actually reads this. Ever. Just on that off chance, I will report again that, in light of tonight's defeat - the second in three months - of district bond proposals, my spirits are a little low. I am pondering the idea of public education, how much I value it, how much others might value it. I am wondering about taxes, and the purposes of taxes. I am sad and angry and in denial - trying to go through the entire grieving process all at once, I suppose. 

But, that's not what this blog, if it lives, will be about. It does not matter what happened tonight, in the short term. In the long term, it matters very much, but at 7:15 tomorrow morning, I have to be ready for another day with my 7th and 8th graders. Many of them will know what happened today, and others will not. Very few of them will have lain awake tonight thinking about how their lives have just been impacted. To them, it'll just be Wednesday, and maybe that's not the worst way to approach the Day After. It'll be just an ordinary day.

The thing is, inside school, the most ordinary days include extraordinary moments. Teaching and learning can be strange business. Working with young people can cause you to want to pull your hair out, even all the time you are laughing. You know the job is rewarding, but on some days, you are not sure whether you really want to have earned any reward.

This blog is just going to be my reminder to me that of course I am sure. If along the way, someone else reads (by accident, or something), and she or he is reminded that our schools are pretty special places specifically because of our kids, well, then, this night might just give rise to something positive, after all.