March.

First-year teachers in the Washoe County School District are bombarded with hundreds of trainings, meetings, and mentor relationships, ostensibly in order to prepare them for their newly chosen career.  When I began teaching, this barrage of time-wasters only served to add to my already abundantly stressful workload; one of the many little hoops through which I had to jump was a weekly meeting with a woman sent from the powers that be to help me.  Her job was grant funded; she had recently left the classroom, and she worked a caseload of new teachers and teachers that were in trouble and needed support. I am sure that she was once good in the classroom, and that she is now helpful to many teachers, but our teaching styles were so different that I always left our meetings with a new set of post-it notes, some highlighter pens, an idea that I would never use about writing kids names on popsicle sticks to call on them equitably, and a feeling that I had permanently lost an hour of my life.

She did share one of the most valuable insights of my career however, and I am very grateful to her for it.  It was March, and I was extremely stressed about the upcoming end of the semester, my students' lack of motivation, and my inability to prepare for class because I spent so much time meeting with her. She saw the look in my eyes and, perhaps because she realized that I was about to throw someone, maybe her, through the window, she opened a notebook and showed me a piece of paper containing a graph correlated to the months of a school year.  She proceeded to explain that much research had been done about teacher and student morale, and that March was always the lowest point for people in academia.  The line did drop, almost off the chart, in March.  She looked me in the eye and told me that every March that I taught would suck, but that April and May would always follow, and with them, hope, accomplishment, and career-contentment would return.  The realization that this feeling is part of a pattern, and that this too shall pass, has been a real comfort to me ever since.  I guess the long meetings about wait-time, teaching transitions, and word-walls were fair trade for that piece of wisdom.

Now I just need to make it to April and May.