Easier All the Time

I felt like garbage today. Seems like the flu shot and a handful of vitamins is just enough to keep me from calling in. I think I've felt this way for weeks now, too.
I walked in today, having been gone a couple days between a career fair(blah!) and a snow day (yay!)and find that one of the students who has been obsessed with my hair style since the day I walked in is now wearing that same hair style.
Since I'm learning to be sensitive to 5th grade egos, I chose not to say anything. But it looks great on the kid.
Teaching is getting a little easier as I make it more "mine" than it was before. I was not very good at stepping into my cooperating teacher's mold. I'm starting to feel a big conflict in our personality types on the horizon. She's so organization-minded, so into spending extra time(she's in on weekends and nights all the time) and I'm a lot more into getting everything I can out of a day. I remember how much I resented my teachers wasting my time. So when I design activities, or units, they don't sum up into multiple choice tests very well. And I hate multiple choice tests. I like essays, I like discussions, reports, art, music, presentations, etc.
Multiple choice tests are another way that public schools imprison the minds of young people. If you're creative enough to see more than one interpretation of a question, you're punished with indecision about it. When you bottle up creativity, it comes out looking like rage. And we wonder why our youth creative and enjoy such violent, angry art. What are they angry at?
They're angry at a great big machine that's smashing all the energy and creativity out of them- stealing their most active, energetic hours of the day and wasting it on something somebody at the state told your uneducated grandma they'd do so they could get elected.
And unfortunately, I get to be one tiny cog that's making that machine lurch forward over a cliff.
Being part of this system feels like driving nails with bananas. I know what it is I want to do, and I've got the energy. Feels like the right motion, but nothing is happening.