I felt like a god yesterday when I put a new double-A battery in the clock on my wall. For a few days, the second hand had been struggling to make it up past the number seven. It climbed a few tick marks and then fell, shuddering back down to the number six. I was stuck in perpetual 10:30.

With a new battery in place, the second hand marched proudly up the left side of the clock and then circled back down the right.

“I did that,” I thought, energized and exhausted at the same time. A minute is just so damned short and so freaking long at the same time.

I work at a high school, and to quote my teacher friend, “It’s bad. Baaaaaaaad.”

To be fair, it’s not all bad. My students can be delightful. Yesterday one wrote me a poem and the day before that one brought me a month-old candy cane.

But it’s also bad. Take a group of teenagers. Layer in anxiety, trauma, depression, poverty, and neglect and you’ve got a tiramisu of sadness. Serve it up to overworked, tired teachers and then also let a bunch of old white men pass laws about what should happen in the classroom. Also, cut funding so there’s not enough printer ink to go around. It’s bad.