Pissed ... but not so very much

Today, for the first time since I arrived at FGS, I had a lunch date with a friend for the sole purpose of venting about how mad I am about a co-worker with whom I share a particular responsibility and who is making me CRAZY and expanding my workload significantly this month. And the venting helped, but I was still pissed, and then I had to stay after school for two hours to do the work that is made all the worse by this co-worker's simultaneous irresponsibility and sense of martyrdom.

And I was so irritated by the time I left school that I drove home thinking, "I want to go out to a bar and have a drink and eat bar food and bitch and moan about my job!" I called D to tell her, and she gamely went out with me to the local pubhouse for a drink and nachos, and I kvetched and grumped and bitched up a storm.

And then I came home, still wound up, and read an email from said coworker that pissed me off even further and gave me more reason to vent. So I wrote an angry blog post about how I'm so incredibly frustrated by working with this person and how the whole thing is just so damned frustrating and about how I am damn well not doing this same task next year, no siree bob, not unless we establish some serious ground rules before we ever start, and even then I'm cracking the whip so that s/he damn well  lives up to those groundrules.

But by the time I finished that blog post, I had about worn out my spleen. Getting all the venting out of my system, in conjunction with the two glasses of wine I've now had, has worn me out (not helped by the fact that I woke up before 5:00 a.m. and decided to get out of bed and go to work so that I could start grading at 6:00 a.m. -- yeesh). So I wrote back an email establishing a clear-ish boundary (that is, as clear as seemed politic under the circumstances), which has het me up a little bit, but honestly I'm now feeling tired enough that my anger has mellowed a bit and I've deleted that other blog post and instead am going to tell you a sweet little story about my FGS students, because the fact of the matter is that this colleague will only be a thorn in my side for about another week and then the responsibility is over for this year, and how amazing is it that today is the first day I've been really, really angry about something in my job, and honestly I have just the best job ever, this one co-worker notwithstanding.

So here's the sweet story about my students, who totally made up for my irritating colleague today: Every summer the FGS students have required reading for various and sundry classes. The English department assigns them one mandated book, depending on their grade, and then they have to choose two other books from a recommended list; plus they have social studies and science books to read as well. The library puts together a little booklet with all the required and recommended books and annotations about each one.

Today is the day the booklets were delivered to my classroom, to be passed out to the students in my English classes.

Turns out that the summer reading list day is one of the highlights of the end of the year. As students filed into the classroom and their eyes lit on the pile of booklets on the front table, their faces lit up with joy and excitement. By mid-day, the word had spread, and my last class ran into the classroom, all on fire to get their own copy of the booklet. And they said, in all sincerity and earnestness, things like, "Oh, I love it when the summer list comes out! This is the best day ever!!" One student of all of them said, "I find summer reading kind of stressful, because I'm always worried I won't get the reading done by the time school starts," but even she later recommended enthusiastically to her classmates a particular book on the list, which she said was her favorite book ever. And the rest of them were simply over the moon.

Have you ever heard of anything so adorably eager and dorky and sweet?

Mind you, many of these excited kids are not top students, are not the A English students, but are just kids who think that there are lots of good books out there and that the teachers in the English department might have some great recommendations for which of those books would be fun to read.

On Wednesday night I was chatting with a neighbor who asked how the job was going, and I said to her, "You know, I finally have the academic career I've always wanted. It just took leaving academia in order to achieve it." I made the remark kind of off the cuff, but afterward I decided that it was actually true. And my adorable students today, so eager to think about all the fun books they were going to read over summer break, reinforce those rosy feelings.

Plus, the reading list also came out today for the faculty/staff summer reading! So I have to choose which book I want the school to buy for me  so I can talk about it in fall with my colleagues who chose to read the same group. Fun!

(But boy, that coworker of mine is really chapping my hide. Grrr.)

Added the next morning: Well, apparently my accentuating the positive didn't do much for my subconscious. In my dreams last night I spent what felt like a really long time doing work for this particular project and getting more and more upset about it. I forced myself awake about 3:00 a.m., calmed myself down, fell back asleep, and proceeded to have a very complicated dream in which someone had abandoned a baby boy and I suddenly had him thrust upon me and had to care for him with no notice and without adequate resources. Gee, I wonder what that was about? Not a restful night, and I woke up pissed at my colleague. Sigh. Oh well, it's all over the week after next.

Comments

[ppb]

I want a job where you have to/get to read a book and talk about it. Sounds so fun.

[timna]

I love that part of my job!

[concretegodmother]

i think it's cute that your kids are all giddy about the reading list! wish mine were giddy like that. i have one, maybe two, who will respond that way. :-)

[meansomething]

Your enthusiasm about your job has meant so much to me as I follow you down this path, or a similar one! And though I'm sorry your coworker is such deadweight, how great that you love your job so much that this is the worst it's been.

[Dance]

I wonder if putting the list into a booklet form contributes to their enthusiasm? I picture it looking more like a mini-catalogue of choices, maybe with cover pix, but I'm assuming someone jazzed it up a bit more than the usual photocopied and stapled long list of books in 10pt Times New Roman.