After a sleepless night, I began my 22nd birthday feeling dizzy and nauseous. I grabbed a granola bar, slapped some peanut butter on a piece of bread for lunch, and hit the road.
Throughout the day, I was preparing for activities mere minutes before I taught the lessons. My Spanish was atrocious, as bad as it was on the first day. I forgot words I'd been saying for an entire week, and my students eventually told me, "Just say it in English." I had to work through lunch. My students insisted on misbehaving, and I was cross with them and unwilling to laugh. One little girl looked so guilty when her pencil slipped that I was reminded of Anne Shirley's "Jonah Day" and that unfortunate pencil squeak.
After school, my mentor asked me how I got the three lowest second-graders and suggested I trade some with another teacher. I got home at 6 and crawled, shivering, to bed. Half an hour later, I began an evening of working on lesson plans.
I still haven't relinquished the childhood notion that birthdays should be a notch above the rest of the year, but this birthday provided a rather prosaic entrance into the world of adulthood.
Really, my day wasn't as awful as it sounds. Nothing went horribly wrong, my aid led my students in singing "Happy Birthday," my coworkers gave me a gift, and my evening of work was broken up by several phone calls from around the country. I'm almost glad I had a bad day; last week's perfection had me slightly worried. In the words of Longfellow:
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
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