The New Semester Breathes Down Candy's Neck

I started working on my syllabusses last night. I hate the word "syllabi" because it sounds so idiotic. Like "rhinoceri." I choose the bigger, clunkier SYLLABUSSES with the extra "S" to make it even more lumbering. This word is like a big sweaty girl on a pogo stick. Boing boing boing. Ungainly, awkward, about to come into peril. In other words, it is exactly how I feel right now, hearing Fall Semester hurrying up behind me to push me over.

This is my twice a year gripe about starting school again. As always, I am grateful for the job, but detest the teaching. Not the teaching itself, but the ever-present nerves/stage-fright/gut-twist that I have each and every frakkin' time I step into a classroom. This is now year 15 teaching college. You'd think it would settle down by now. It doesn't.

There I will be, in the bathroom nearest the classroom, in a stall, trying to take deep breaths (not always the keenest idea in a bathroom), and telling myself "They can't stab you. Stop whining, you big pansy."

And then I walk into the room and they all stab me with big knives. Or they look at me when I walk in, which is just as bad.