2 days after year 2 begins: on being a teacher

Happy Weekend!

Hope you all are having a nice break from the busy week. The weather is going to be awesome here and I can't wait to spend a few hours outside relaxing. If only we had a hammock! (and someplace to put it, like a yard)

I had a lot of anxiety about going back to school. I tried to get back in the swing of things and spent several mornings at school prepping the classroom and thinking about how to organize the year. As each day passed and it got closer to students starting back, my nerves overwhelmed me. After leaving the school picnic on Tuesday, I made a comment on how I didn't want school to start back up and I would rather have meetings all day than students. Matt asked me "Why did I decide to be a teacher if that is how I feel?" I told him it isn't exactly like that and it is complicated. I said I wasn't ready to talk about it yet.

Friday night we went downtown to an Italian restaurant and I felt ready to talk to him about my complex emotions on the subject. Teaching feels like such a huge job. There are high expectations placed on us from all sorts of people and places, like the media, parents, students, and administration. We are supposed to meet the needs of all 150 students, and if we don't we are letting them down. We are educating them about how to be decent people while also trying to complete a whole list of standards that at times seem very arbitrary.

Leading up to the first few days of school there is a lot of anxiety. How will it go? Will I be able to handle the work load and the students? Will they support me as their teacher? Will they run over me and I will hate my job for a whole school year? The anticipation is harder than actually going through it, of course. There are things I don't like about teaching, but I get a lot of rewards from my job, which is what I do like about it. Every time there is a break though, it is really hard to go back it seems. Maybe that will get easier on me as the years go by. Does it, fellow teachers? It is no wonder that college grads teach an average of 4 years before quitting. Some days it just feels like too much to handle.

All of these photos come from my pinterest and you can see more of them here. I try to visit it to remind myself what excites me about teaching. So many days I feel inadequate at my job because what I really want my students to understand is how they can be better people and how they can help other people be better. On the first day of school I did a new activity about our strengths and weaknesses. On a large post-it I had the students write a strength of theirs, no name. On a small post-it they wrote a weakness. After walking around the class and seeing what people are good at, only focusing on the strengths, I had them put their post-its on a board. I explained that we are a community and everyone has something to offer. Everyone also has something to learn. We have to support each other and be willing to bring those around us up by being willing to help, to teach, and also not being too proud. I am going to leave it up as a reminder for a few weeks. It also looks pretty cool. I'll try to take a photo of it tomorrow.

Keep on keepin' on.