Release the Hounds...

Okay, the last paper just got graded and another middle school semester is ready to go out in a dizzy whimper of assemblies, surreptitious and not-so-surreptitious in-class eating, Gregory Peck lawyering so well and so vainly in To Kill A Mockingbird and a Fascistic bell at 3:05 releasing all of us back into our real bodies after five months of constant stage acting.

School and teaching school is the greatest experiment in "term limits" ever. Unlike jobs in the real world, teaching comes in little seasonal packages, your office mates and clients changing on a regular basis. It's more like a real life with a birth, old age and death, all in a five month cycle. Tomorrow afternoon we're taken off the feeding tube and another one of the six semesters of middle school hell passes away. Even in the warped psychological wickedness of middle school they go pretty fast. Sure, there are times in every semester that everyone, teacher and students alike, wonders if it will ever end. Ever. Then a day like tomorrow comes and we all forget about the November 12ths and February 9th of the muddle-through year and we get to do our little butterfly out of the chrysalis action. I know we all experience this as a student, but I highly suggest everyone try it at least once as a teacher. Even with the obligatory assembly and furtive candy canes.

Oh, and in other, more 'burque babble-esque, news...the end of the semester means more postings, especially next week when we in the fake land known as education get (and yes, I'm am gloating on an Olympic scale here) THE WEEK OFF THAT NOBODY ELSE GETS!!! I definitely plan on calling all my friends with "real" jobs at work in regular intervals next week, asking "how's work going today?" and "what day of the week is today? I keep forgetting."

It's a wonder I don't have more friends.