The Last Day of Summer

I should probably be telling you all where I've been for the past month (spoiler alert, the answer is traveling around Europe with my parents), but we're going to skip past that for now because I want to write this post in the moment.

So here it is, the night before school begins again. I'm actually not feeling that first day of school nervous excitement (yet anyway), possibly because I haven't had that much time to ruminate on the fact that soon I'll be back in front of a classroom full of half-asleep kids staring at me, expecting me to teach them English or at least be sort of entertaining while they try to stay awake.

I'm going back to the same school as last year though, so I more or less know what to expect, and I suppose that's making me feel less anxious as well.

I also probably don't feel nervous because no one can expect me to be prepared to teach classes tomorrow when I have no idea which classes those might be. AKA, I don't have my schedule yet so I'm just going to go show up in the morning and see how everyone's summer was and probably not do too much else. Last year, having hardly any communication from the people in charge was extremely frustrating, but I've been Spainified since then and I've come to expect and even embrace it.

I am kind of excited to get back to having somewhere to be all day, a job to do, and to see all those kids again. I just love when they scream "Hello!" every time they see me, in school or in the street.

Being a second-year teacher should be interesting, though. Everything will be the same, except slightly different. Many of the teachers I worked with last year will probably be gone, so I'll likely be getting a whole new set of coworkers. Perhaps the kids will seem more grown up. I'm hoping that I'll be able to see their progress more this year. I'll definitely be getting to know them better, and I'm making it my personal project to properly learn all 400+ of their names. My memory is definitely sub-par, so we'll see how that goes.

Okay, I guess writing this post has helped me get that nervous excitement started a little bit. Now I just need to get to bed so I don't miss the bus to school in the morning.

To my fellow auxiliares--happy first day of school tomorrow! To everybody else, happy October.

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