gremdark

In twenty minutes, I'm signing on to an interview prep webinar for the alternative teaching certification program I'm pursuing. Hopefully it'll give me good things to work towards ahead of my interview next week.

I keep reading up on what program alumni say its major cons are. Luckily all of them so far seem to be the obvious pitfalls of getting your certification in one summer instead of over a few years of university and student teaching. I badly want to get a proper degree long-term, but, well, I can't afford to take on more student debt at present, and with my fiance's job on the rocks due to his bosses' ongoing divorce, we could really use a second, more stable salary in this household. I hope that my previous experiences will help with the lesson planning side, and the more substitute teaching I do, the more practice I'll get with classroom management. If I actually get in to the program, I'll have a mentor during my first few years. That ought to help.

In the meantime, I'm reading a lot of library books about classroom management and related disciplines. If anyone has any beloved parenting or teaching books with useful perspectives on establishing routines and setting meaningful consequences, I'd appreciate recs!

It's been a while since I've felt the urge to post on the internet diary-style, but I'm processing something this week.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been substitute teaching in our local public school district. It's the first thing resembling a full-time job that I've held since before I got so sick in 2019, and I'm hoping it'll give me a sense of whether the alternative certification program I'm pursuing is the right fit for me.
The adjustment period has been significant, but not unmanageable. I've taught before, but that was one-on-one pandemic teaching. Managing a 25 kid classroom is a different beast altogether. Still, I thought I was doing okay before Friday.
On Friday, a student called me a faggot. Shouted it out to the whole class, in fact. I think I would have shrugged that one off by itself, but other students used similarly homophobic and transphobic language towards me throughout the rest of that day. I taught five classes at that school. This happened in three of them. One student called me a "birl," which is not a word I'd realized had made it to this side of 1995. But there you go.
I'm visibly queer in the southern United States in 2026. I've been called slurs before. Not since I was eleven years old myself have children that small used hate speech towards me. It bothers me to know that eleven year olds in my neighborhood have that language on standby, that its use feels normal to them.
I'd like to think I covered it well in the moment, keeping my head high and taking down names and details for their regular teacher to punish. But that night, and in the days that followed, it felt like I was carrying a lead weight on my shoulders. It's taken days for the exhaustion to diminish.
Logically, I know that it's normal for that sort of language to wound. That's the point of its use. I know I'm not weak for feeling its impact. At the same time, it's hard not to reproach myself for not having a "thicker skin."
Tomorrow and Friday, I'm subbing for a G/T teacher who runs small group pullout classes at a K-5 elementary school. I'm hoping it'll be a good mental reset. But we shall see.