At one point this week, I had one of those rare “there is no more ‘nice’ left in me” moments. It was one of those weeks.

Today is… a number of things.

Today is the thirteen years to the day that Magic Johnson announced his retirement from the Lakers due to HIV.1 I still remember that Thursday afternoon like it was yesterday.

Today is also the official opening of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar”.2

And today was finally the end of the second six weeks3 which means that Season 8 is a third of the way through.4 Time keeps flapping its wings faster and faster, indeed.

1. which the Lakers unbelievably trotted as “a severe case of the flu” for a couple of weeks [↩]
2. Can’t wait to see that thing in 70mm IMAX! [↩]
3. which was technically only 5 weeks but felt like fifteen… still not as bad as the 3rd, which is only 4 but will feel like forty. [↩]
4. Yikes!!! [↩]

Some of the funniest moments of the year happen when we do “Guess My Age”.

For contrast, when we got to Leonardo DiCaprio…

Last year:1

Girl: Wait, he’s HOW old?!?

This year:2

Girl: I don’t care. If he’s 62, I’m 61.

o_O

Also, I decided to keep former Texas coach Mack Brown on the list. When I told them:

I considered kicking him off, but I didn’t have the heart…

…a young man in class today retorted with:

“UT did.”3

Eight Nine weeks into the new season, and things are slowly4 starting to feel like home.

1. Season 7 [↩]
2. Season 8 [↩]
3. That burned a little… [↩]
4. but surely [↩]

I’ve said it before:

Being a teacher gets more difficult with each passing year — not easier.

Granted, we probably get better at our jobs with added experience, but things sure don’t feel easier.

I keep holding my breath for the day that I realize that I’m wrong about this, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that that day won’t cross paths with me this year.

The poetic parallel?

“The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.”

When I started this job almost eight years ago, I remember telling myself that it only felt like a proper “job”1 one day2 out of five, and that the other four3 felt more like a hobby.

And that has always been my point of reference — that if the “days where this job feels like a grind” quotient exceeds 1 in 54, that maybe something is wrong.

That if that quotient starts tilting the wrong way, that maybe it’s time to look for that sunset.

That’s the balance that I’ve been trying to get back to for these first seven weeks of the new journey, and thankfully, things are starting to feel like they’re settling into place.

Thankfully, these first seven weeks have been wonderful thus far.

Mostly. 5

1. insert negative connotations associated with the word “job” or “work” or “grind” [↩]
2. well, maybe two days… [↩]
3. …or three. [↩]
4. or maybe 2 in 5, tops [↩]
5. Just hoping it stays at least “4 out of 5 days” mostly. [↩]

I think most teachers – myself included – would never vent publicly about the difficulties of our profession — trust me, you couldn’t make up half of the stuff, nor could you imagine it unless you’ve been in our shoes.

But based on a number of things in life that have transpired over the past few weeks, this much I know:

If you have people in your life that you appreciate — including teachers1 — there’s nothing wrong with letting them know.

Because a new day does not always bring what one expects.

1. perhaps, especially teachers, since I’m biased… but this is not on my behalf, rather on behalf of my professional kin. [↩]

The cafeteria at the Oak Hill Motorola1 campus had great breakfast tacos. Bacon egg potato cheese on grilled tortilla.

That’s all I was thinking about as I made my way from the parking garage into the lobby and saw the mob of people crowded around the television. For a selfish second I could only think of bacon egg potato cheese on grilled tortilla as I made my way towards MOS-11 that morning, thirteen years ago today, when I heard a guy explain to a friend that walked in just before me:

“Another plane just flew into the other tower from behind…”

Like anybody else will tell you: the rest of the day — nay, the week — was beyond surreal. 2 One of my coworkers and I had a conversation about how our different cultures3 tend to handle such national tragedies — would we sensationalize it on the news, or try to put it out of our memory and pretend it never happened? In the aftermath of the dot-com bubble burst — and in the context of the global economy — what happened that day may have marked an inflection point towards the current chapter of my journey, which began five years later (eight years ago, today).

That was before Facebook and Twitter and smartphones.4

A couple of years ago I asked my students what they remembered about that day. 5 Most of them told me that that was the day that they got to watch TV all day, and that their parents cried a lot.

I was eight when the Challenger explosion happened, and I barely understood much about that. 6

Yesterday I told my students that I actually remember life before the internet, and they asked me what that was like. I paused before answering, and said,

“It was easier to hide from parents.”

That apparently drew some heartfelt agreement. Seems that a lot of their parents track them via their smartphones. I cannot imagine life as a teenager like that.7

Tomorrow marks the close of the first 5-day week of the school year. While it’s been an exhausting one,8 it wasn’t close to being that bad.

1. later Freescale [↩]
2. Newspaper front pages showed pictures of people that were caught above the floors where the plane hit choosing to escape from the tower by diving off the tower head-first — images that I will never forget [↩]
3. He was Indian, I’m Korean [↩]
4. Hey, iPhone 6 preorders begin tonight~ [↩]
5. today’s high school seniors were 4 or 5 on nine-eleven [↩]
6. I *do* remember that my school teachers were saying that one of the astronauts was a teacher — Christa McAuliffe — and that my friends laughed when some of the teachers said out loud, “that could’ve been me!” [↩]
7. Uh, not that I ever did anything bad when I was a kid, of course. [↩]
8. filled with grading AP Stat papers [↩]