Teacher Friends

Kim Vinh called me this week from a Sequoia High School basketball game. Last year, on that very day, she, Meg, and I had spent our supervision duties breathlessly planning Freshman Activity Day--an entire day of team-building, class-building, and motivation-building activities with a tiny budget and responsibility for 400 wiggly freshman. We reminisced about the stress and exhaustion and exulted in the fact that we weren't currently planning FAD (though Kim was superivising a basketball game).

Point is, I'm grateful for my teacher friends, a mix of STEPpie pals and between-class-vent buddies from Sequoia last year. These are the women whose eyes widen in agreed understanding when I say, "and THEN Johnny looked at me and said..." and who my heart aches over when I've heard that they have spent yet another hundred of their hard earned dollars on classroom supplies or stayed at school until 8:00 pm to finish grading the essays so the kids won't have to wait any longer. The ones I cheer for, even as I squirm internally, knowing that my current situation demands so much less of me, knowing that I function in a system that is vastly more forgiving and deal with students who are enormously more academically prepared than the system and students they deal with everyday.

We try to have dinner together every month. We laugh, we commiserate, we eat until we're bursting, and then sit in tired silence, until someone wryly points out that it's only 10:00.