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Throughout the years, I've often been characterized as a bit of a perfectionist.

I have a vivid memory from when I was maybe 3 or 4 years old of lying on the kitchen floor, coloring. My mom walked across the kitchen and knocked my arm, causing my crayon to leave a wild mark across the rest of the sheet I was coloring.

I started crying.

My coloring page was ruined.

My mom tried desperately to calm me down and convince me that I could still finish coloring that page.

I refused. It was ruined. There was no fixing it.

I've also been prone to start crying and give up when something wasn't going according to plan. I can get so intensely frustrated that I just don't want to continue. It's not worth it, I find. If I can't do it the best way, I don't want to do it at all.

This isn't really a desirable trait to have.

In fact, it's pretty bloody annoying.

I'm starting to get nervous, because lately, the thing I don't feel like I'm doing well, is teaching.

I'm starting to question whether or not writing is something that can actually be taught, which doesn't say very much for my purpose or what they're paying me for. The students are intensely bored by the textbook that I'm teaching out of, but I had to use it. I also have to teach a certain kind of curriculum.

I'm super frustrated, because I feel like I can teach the same principles from a different angle and garner more student interest. But since I'm a first-year teacher at this university, I am more restricted. Even once I get some of my freedom back, I'm not going to have as much freedom as I did as a graduate student teaching. Doesn't that seem backwards? But I guess that's the difference of being at a mid-size private school and going to a huge ass state school.

To top things off, I'm being observed on Monday. When I've been observed in the past, it has gone well - but it's still nerve-wracking. I have a lot less student participation in my classes here than I did at my old university, which ends up going right back to the kind of material I was teaching.

I knew getting into this job that it wasn't necessarily going to be a lifelong career move for me, but I'm a bit alarmed by the fact that less than two months into it I'm already contemplating my escape.

I guess I'm most thrown off by the fact that the first set of papers I graded was really bad. I spent a month teaching material and still ended up with 60% of the class in the C-range. I have a stack of 44 papers to grade from my other two classes. I've had them since Thursday, and I haven't touched them. I'm too afraid that they're going to be just as bad, if not worse, than the other batch.

The only real sense of mastery you can feel when you teach is breaking through to students. When that's not happening, it makes me feel like a failure. Colleagues say that sometimes you have to be satisfied with getting through to a handful of them, but that's not enough for me.

I'm sorry; it's just not.