Let me at 'em.

After two exciting but grueling weeks with the same thirty future educators in the same stuffy classroom, I'm ready to get out into the public school wilderness and wield all this heady new educational theory I've picked up.

Bring me children, and I will teach them to question their particular realities, but not the rules of my classroom.

All of this sounds fine in the vacuum of our inexperienced discussion groups - no, really, it actually does - but I can't help but feel that classroom discussions among my peers will get a hell of a lot more interesting once we get some actual face time with the students who, after all, were supposed to be the reason we took this job.

So I'm looking forward to Tuesday, when I begin my summer-long stint as a student teacher.

I'll be cutting my teeth at a small public academy in the troubled East New York neighborhood. This isn't the school where I'll teach next fall, but it is the place where kids from that school go for the summer if they fail their classes or their end of grade tests.

From what I've heard so far, summer school is tough on everybody: the students who have to give up half a day of cartoon time, the teachers who are faced with an entire classroom of kids who have just been told that they are failures, and the district who (Please, God) has to pay to keep the air-conditioning running through July.

But in a way, I'm glad I'll be thrown into a difficult situation from the beginning. Some of these kids may show up in my class on September 8th, so I'm going to pretend that they all will, and try to start being the teacher I've said I want to be right away. I'm looking at this as a bonus month of orientation.

After all, it wouldn't hurt if, on the first day of my class, a kid who'd known me all July leaned over to her neighbor and said, "Oooh, I had her in summer school. She was hard."