All student and teacher identities have been disguised to protect anonymity.

If you haven't seen the viral video "Gangnam Style," then you are missing out. Not only will you feel awkward at parties when all of your friends know how to ride an invisible horse to a techno beat, but you are also clearly never on the internet and, as such, either have lots of real-time friends or no friends at all. In the latter case, don't worry about it.

The great thing about "Gangnam Style," if you can quantify such a delicious atrocity as anything like Great, is that it has all of the essential elements of a viral video. It is the meta-viral video. It a) takes itself just seriously enough, b) involves something that everyone can agree is pretty much wonderful (invisible horse dancing), and c) every single, last person in the video is absolutely committed to what is going on. You know music video love is real when you can mime lassoing a calf in synchronicity.

My first few weeks of teaching have also been a lot like "Gangnam Style," in that they, like a viral video, seem to have happened overnight. When I started work at New Tech Odessa, my principal warned me that every day I would "wake up running," meaning that every day is a very productive race. At the Olympics. But, as a first year teacher, I'm not so much concerned anymore about the level of work that NTO demands as I am of the fact that, for the first time in six years, I am working somewhere from 7:00 in the morning to 6:00 at night; that's if you don't count the hours of prep work I do at home. It's not unusual for a teacher, but it's unusual for a former career student. In fact, everything about teaching in a public high school is unusual.

At the end of last week, I started getting a little down.
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