I ran into Sean yesterday in Harvard Square, about thirty seconds after I had said goodbye to Peter post-dinner at Hong Kong (Hee. A cold can of Chef Boyardee). I was very, very tired from work and maybe a little drunk on scallion pancakes (ok, so you probably can’t actually get drunk on scallion pancakes. Maybe it was the scallion pancake sauce), and so I was reeling a little bit from exhaustion. I lurched into Sean and berated him for moving to Boston and failing to get in touch with me, while his sister and friend looked on in bemusement. And when I got home, I was so giggly and punchy from weariness that Ross asked me if I had had anything to drink.

I tell you this in order that you will understand the full extent of the following statement:

I thought I was tired yesterday, but in fact I was practically bubbling over with enthusiastic energy compared to how pooped I was after work today.

Here is how tired I was at 5:30pm….

I wanted a bottle of Half and Half, but when I picked up a bottle of iced tea from the cooler by mistake, I was too tired to put it back and pull out the right kind. I looked at the bottle, thought about reaching down to make the switch, and decided that if I did that I might faint. So I just drank iced tea instead. This may not sound like much, unless you know how much I like Half and Half.

Fortunately, I’m tired for a really wonderful reason — I’m tired from using my brain in interesting ways all day long. Today’s session of teacher bootcamp was sort of surreal because it required so much intellectual effort. More than most of my graduate classes. It was also surreal because every single one of my colleagues is incredibly smart, well-read, and provocative. Every one. No one was bored or boring, no one didn’t do the reading, and no one said a single stupid thing. That never happens in my graduate classes. We spent two hours this morning discussing a section of Plato’s Phaedrus and an article that attempted to describe the history of narrative by analysing three child-authored stories. The conversation bounced from person to person for the entire two hours, I was wide awake and listening to every comment, and I can’t remember when I last had that much fun thinking about complex ideas with other people. It was a little bit like being in heaven (heaven for people who enjoy erudite conversations, anyway).

The best thing about it is that I also feel like as a team, we can switch from that kind of dialogue to cracking totally silly jokes, and back, in a second.

Speaking of seconds, my department (Humanities) spent approximately a billion trillion of them in the latter half of the day working on coming up with benchmarks for our subject (skills or standards kids have to achieve in order to be promoted), talking about our accountability plan (which is the list of promises we make to the state of Massachusetts about what our students will achieve. If we don’t keep our promises, we lose our charter) and trying to figure out how we can actually assess progress that kids are making towards our accountability goals, through the benchmarks. Yes, I know how boring and meaningless that last sentence was. But it’s vital stuff for us to work out now, and I think it’s quite astonishing that four people were smart and caring enough about these things to spend three hours arguing about them this afternoon.

Okay — now I’m officially done gushing about my job. You have permission to remind me of my gushiness in a month, when I am actually teaching and scared out of my mind.

P.S. Hi, Barb! Happy to have you in Boston for the next little bit!