Star Crossed Love and Crisis Intervention

It's officially the second day in 2014, and I'm four days away from beginning the second half of the school year.  I was hoping that at this point in break I would be brimming with new ideas about how to teach "Romeo and Juliet", writing, success time, and how to best manage the instructional calendar. Sadly, I'm anything but enthused.  Inside, I feel empty.  Creativity?  Pretty much nonexistent.  Positivity? More like frustration.  I've spent the past few years aligning the 9th grade curriculum and instructional calendar to the Common Core and the Indiana Standards, only to read in the paper that our glorious legislators are ready to tank both and start fresh.

I've read the concerns about the Common Core, and I like to think I'm well-versed in all things curriculum and instruction oriented, and honestly, I support the Common Core. I don't support state legislation about education that is created on the ideals of people who have never taught a day in their life.  People are afraid of what they don't know, what they think will happen based on a variety of fallacies floating around the internet, and their own opinions about how they want their child to be educated (which you are entitled to as a parent).

I appreciate that concern, I value those opinions, but at the end of the day, I want answers based on evidence, rather than emotions.  I want the students I teach to leave high school reading at an appropriate grade level.  I want them to be able to speak and listen in an educated away.  I want them to treat their fellow brothers and sisters with dignity and respect.  I want them to be free of racist stereotypes that will do far more damage than a standard that expects them to evaluate the reason behind a valid argument.  I want them to be free from teachers who simply don't want to be in the classroom anymore.  Some who have already written them off as menaces to society.  I want them to question, to explore, and think a little.  Not be told what to think.

I'm tired of teaching "Romeo and Juliet" for the 20th time.  I have great essential questions, a killer statement of enduring understanding, and my favorite "Verona Twilight", but aside from that, I don't want anything to do with teaching something that is so damn sad and idiotic.  Can you tell I'm just not feeling this?  Yet, I'm full of guilt.  Because I should care. Or should I? How can I get my students excited to delve into something that I want nothing to do with? It's cold and snow is everywhere, can't we teach something other than a tragedy based on the impulsive idiotic decisions of two ridiculous teenagers?

Sometimes I wish that people would just get out of my way. Including the asinine legislators at every level.  Let me do my job.  Let me figure out how to create some passion in the classroom instead of selling my soul to standardized tests.  I want my teaching to mean something, and right now, I'm not sure it does.