Ok, people, here's the thing. Teaching is sort of like being in one of those ball pits that they have at Chucky Cheese. Only the ball pit is bottomless, and every ball represents a task of some kind. Little red balls for all the lesson plans. Yellow balls for the grading. Green balls for the copies and handouts you have to prepare. Orange for the administrative paperwork. Blue for the endless exceptions that have to be handled individually--late work, lost handouts, absences. Purple for classroom upkeep--maintaining bulletin boards, organizing file folders, shelving books, rearranging desks.

So you are constantly trying to get on top of the balls (so you don't sink, right?), only when you push one down, five more fall in to fill its space. And when you push several out of the way, the balls behind those slip to the front.

The upshot: I'm exhausted. I have lists of my lists. I have pages and pages in my notebook of things to remember, but I don't have the time to reread the pages to see if I forgot anything. This is like the exact opposite of grad school: there, I had a few, vastly important, dreadfully difficult tasks with great lengths of time between them. Here, I have millions of tiny, individually insignificant, comparatively easy tasks, with almost no time to complete them.

It's an adjustment.

I'm getting there, but it's an adjustment.

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