I always maintained that Tuesdays had nothing going for them. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not about to suggest that Mondays have a lot going for them, I would continue. Mondays, though, have the force of the weekend behind them and the sheer necessity to get going. You push through Monday like you push through a two-kilometer, 5% grade climb at the beginning of a long bike ride: it’s not pleasant, but you still have the energy to do it, so you just do it.
Wednesday carries the advantage of being the mid-way marker of the week: make it through Wednesday, and it’s all downhill from there. Thursday is almost Friday, and Friday is Friday. Only Tuesday has nothing going for it.
This all carries the assumption that the only enjoyable part of the week, the only part of the week really worth enjoying, is the weekend. In the summer, for a teacher, that just isn’t true: every day is the weekend in a sense. Every day can be a day of exploration, a day of getting stamped with anti-bug, anti-wild-attack-cat antidotes. Every day can include some discovery and rediscovery with one’s children.
That’s the easy part. The challenge is getting that to carry over into the school year, to think, “‘Tuesday has nothing going for it’ is nonsense because all days have something going for them.”
To live each day as if, given a choice of any day in your life to relive, you chose today.
At this point in the year, less than two weeks before the kids head back into the classroom, I’m always confident that I’ll succeed. Last year, that confidence didn’t even make it through the first week of school, so challenging were a couple of classes. But in the end, that too is a choice.