the end of 2015-2016 school year

This year has been the most difficult teaching year I have ever experienced. I look at this sentence now and a flood of thoughts come to me, recounting the various emotions and memories -- which feel more like physical dents in a car than little chemical expulsions in the brain --associated with the year, the wordlessness I feel when attempting to uncover the experience of it all. It's embarrassing, a little, as a writer to be without words. I'll attempt to explain:

I felt a wreck. I was as many euphemisms and metaphors for crushed as any poet could muster. I was crumpled by sleeplessness, my severe dedication to ensuring the curriculum work, my attempts to please my co-teacher and work with her as much as I could, and learning a new grading system very much unlike all other systems I have seen. Demoralized and distraught, I kept pushing. I held so much tension in my body, a countlessness of tears sucked into whatever space possible and released at odd times, and my own opinions (to the principal, at least) about what was truly wrong: I needed help and I couldn't communicate in sync with how they needed it.

But honestly, as I read over these words, I get tired of recreating it all in my head. I want to remind myself and my readers that I am not the most knowledgeable of teachers (I still have some learning to do), but I'm a good teacher. And I am getting better. And I cannot wait to chronicle the building and the growth I will encounter and experience in the next year to come. New school, new ninth grade, new routines. I'm into the building. I'm ready to start thinking about curriculum.