Regarding the Happenings of the Last Month- Month?!

An illustration of my thirst for knowledge. What mysteries lurk beneath the bell??

 I am totally immersed in school work, researching, and student teaching. I spend hours researching the most mundane things that are brought up in my graduate classes, simply out of curiosity. I'm reading at least a book a week- on top of school books- about education, lesson planning, child psychology, and anything else to do with kids and the teaching of said kids. Between my 3 full days a week at the school, plus commuting, the things I'm volunteering to do and the graduate classes and homework, plus the random obsessive researching, I'm pulling about 50-60 hours a week. That's before you add in the volunteering I'm still doing for the two non-profits I have worked with for over a year now.

My school is awesome, and I really adore the kids. My mentor teachers are great. What's weird is how I can be so passionately excited one day, and then so exhausted and almost ready to pack it in the next. I've never had this experience before. On the days I'm exhausted and overwhelmed, it's not that I truly want to quit. It's that I am humbled by how much I have to learn, and I am sometimes paralyzed with fear that I'm not doing it right, or that I'm failing the kids, and sometimes the gravity of my potential impact on them (even as a random student teacher) really hits me and it freaks me out. After only a month there, they are fiercely loyal, and kind, and protective of me in such sweet and peculiar ways. We have inside jokes. I suggest books to them, they suggest books to me, and we wave to each other in the halls. I'm bone tired, and I feel like I've been there for a year instead  of a month, but it's really incredibly satisfying. The happiness that it brings them when I do something as simple  as check out a book for them that I think they'd like seems like more than I deserve. I'm reminded that, although so many people claim to not want to teach high school students because they're already "set in stone", they are truly still so impressionable, and young, and innocent, and can swing wildly from one future to another.

Other than all that, I'm ready to get off of these damned crutches. One more week. And then I'll really be flying. In other school news, I start my final class towards my post graduate certificate in sustainable development. Me + school, together forever.