6:28 AM
I wake with a start and check my watch. It's so dark out. HOW IS IT 6:28???? I was supposed to get up at 5 am to exercise. If I've ever overslept, it's always been before 6 am. This is seriously late for me. I rush out of bed and run to the shower. Monday is off to a hurried, rushed start. 11:30-ish AM My principal walks in as I'm teaching my third math rotation. We are reviewing for our upcoming fractions test and it's not the most exciting lesson. Some of the students are looking at their paper instead of up at me and the Smartboard. The rest of the class is in a technology rotation instead of doing some fabulous lesson work or problem solving. I wish what I was teaching seemed more impressive. No one is ever there for those magical moments of inspiration in the classroom, but the blah lessons/ Someone always shows up! 3:35 PM My mother calls from the school playground. It's sunny and not super cold and my son wants to stay to play football on the lawn with his friends. My daughter does not want to stay and play- she wants to head home. I assure my mom I'm on the parkway heading home and will be there in 5 minutes. 3:42 PM I walk across the street to the school lawn and send my mother and daughter home. I sit on the step and feel the sunshine on my face. The promise of spring. As the boys call my son's name, I think for a moment how strange it is that this child who was once a baby totally dependent on me is now a little boy in the world, with his own friends, his own thoughts, his own feelings and opinions. I breathe in the fresh air and feel grateful for all I have. 7:45 PM Walking home from the elementary school, I'm holding Megan's little hand. It's dark now. We are leaving our Daisy meeting, where I am a co-leader. I feel guilty because the leader- my friend- who is a teacher and has triplets and a 2 year old!- has done everything for the meeting. And it was all incredible and a lot of work. I also feel grateful, holding my daughter's hand as we make our way home. I think of Bella, who passed away last week at the age of 5. She won't get to go to kindergarten or be a Daisy. I think of her mom who signed up to be class parent in her pre-k class at the start of the year. How she tried to have every experience she could. I am sad and grateful and guilty, all rolled together.
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Thoughts.
It is only recently that I've really given thought to, well, my thoughts. And the idea that my thoughts might not be true. They could be a story I've been telling myself for years but a story is all it really is. And I can tell myself a new story by changing my thoughts. In most situations, we have a choice as to how we will think about what is occurring. We can choose to only see the negatives and think negative thoughts on repeat. But it we choose to see the possibilities or the blessings or even the lessons, we can turn the situation around. Or at least make ourself less miserable. My thoughts this year have often been about how overwhelmed I feel at work. How there isn't enough time to accomplish everything. I say to myself "I'm drowning." It feels true to me, but it doesn't help anything at all, especially my mindset. I keep confirming to myself how impossible it is and that leads to feeling paralyzed and unhappy. My thinking now is that I need to come up with an action plan for how to accomplish tasks. I need to accept that everything might not get done all at once but tell myself words of encouragement about my ability to effectively teach. It's worth a try! All the thoughts about how hard it is and how unhappy I feel are not making anything easier or making me happier. Do you believe everything you tell yourself? How do you switch off unproductive thoughts? Today kicked off the first of Megan's birthday celebrations. Next Friday, she will turn 6 years old, but today was her friends' party, held at Cool Crafts. Megan loves arts and crafts so this was the perfect venue for her party.
If you check the calendar, you know today is March 9th, but looking at Megan, you might think it was somewhere around December 25th. Her birthday dress, cake, and goody bags all featured her Elf on the Shelf (herein referred to as E.O.T.S.). Megan has become obsessed with all things related to the E.O.T.S. When he left on Christmas Day, there were major separation pangs. We came to believe that the E.O.T.S. could come back for her birthday in March. We thought this was an original idea, but lo, the E.O.T.S. people were already ALL over that and made a book called Birthday Traditions. This book says your Christmas Elf can come back on your birthday! (Woohoo!) The book even comes with a cupcake costume for the E.O.T.S. to wear. So, Megan insisted that her birthday dress feature the E.O.T. S. And her cake. And her goody bags. I pitched for LOL dolls instead. Maybe My Little Ponies? Shopkins? Nope. She had her mind made up. And it IS her birthday and if that's what she wants..... Last year's cake featured Gizmo from the Gremlins. I kid you not. She got a Gizmo doll last Christmas and it was her favorite thing ever for a few months, including March. Megan is many amazing things. She has a mind of her own. And she picks the quirkiest themes for her birthday parties! Since last May, I have been working on eating healthier and losing weight. I've been following the 2B Mindset program through Beachbody and have really altered how I eat and how I approach food. I've lost 20 pounds but have been stuck at this weight since October. I go up a few, I go down a few- but always end up back in the same spot. I want to lose about 25 more pounds so being stuck for five months isn't ideal. (Although I guess this is what maintenance looks like...)
Frustration has been creeping in. I've been exercising and upping my water intake, but haven't been able to break through the plateau. Consistency is hard- it's hard to check of all the boxes of what I have to do each day to lose weight, especially when I feel like I've already made so many key changes. This week has been very challenging. Sadness has crept in and an overall feeling of dissatisfaction. Yesterday, I expressed that emotion or didn't express it, if you will, because I ate things I normally don't. Including chocolate. One after the other of mini Snickers bars. Today's choice was to continue down the road of emotional eating or take a breath and remember why I decided to make these changes in the first place. How much happier I feel when I eat things that are good for my body. How nice it is not to be ashamed of myself and feel that persistent sense of guilt and embarrasment. How lovely it was to go into a clothing store I could never before and buy a shirt in a size MEDIUM! How I deserve a rich and happy life that includes looking and feeling my best. It doesn't matter how many times you fall....it's that you get back up again. "Can we play Monopoly?" my son Alex asks me as I finish washing the dinner dishes.
My mind debates the idea silently. I have SO. MUCH. WORK. TO. DO. I was hoping to sit down for an hour and sketch out some plans for the rest of the week, create a review for an upcoming fractions test, check the pile of math papers that have been waiting for my attention, plan out some small group reading lessons. Respond to Slice of Life emails. Create a letter for a grant explaining a trip my class will take. All work that I can never get to at actual work. Most of my day is spent directly in front of the students. The prep I get involves phone calls, photocopying, pulling up the resources I need on my Smartboard, or attending a meeting. After dismissal, I'm either on bus duty, in a meeting, or trying to plug in all the chrome books that need to be charged for the next morning. Then rushing home to take my children to whatever activity they have that afternoon. Next is homework (for them), dinner preparation, eating. Soon it will be getting them ready for bed which lately has involved laying in my daughter's bed then sitting in my son's chair. By that time of night, I'm exhausted and cannot get up to do more work. So this after dinner-before bed is the time I have to do any of the stacks of work I have to do. "Sure we can play," I tell him and he beams and rushes off to set up the game. A lesson I learned this week is life is short and precious, fragile and fleeting. Our tomorrows are not guaranteed. My son will not always want to play Monopoly with me on a school night after dinner. Tonight, he did. Tonight, we did. He crushed me- built hotels on every property and I owed him $1000 every time I landed on his space. We laughed. I made the best choice for my child. But oh how I wish sometimes my job didn't put me in the position of having to choose between getting it all done and spending time with my family. How every night and weekend didn't involve lugging home a big work bag and trying to find a pocket of time to plan, assess, create, communicate. An ongoing conversation I have with other teachers is how we are given so little time to do the actual work of crafting our lessons, being reflective, assessing, planning. All of this is expected to be done after work because during work is completely occupied by the business of teaching and being with the children. Does every professional job involve hours of work on your own time? Or do most professionals leave work at work when they leave at the end of the day? Having this conversation feels awkward- like people think you don't want to work hard. Like you aren't grateful to get out of work by 3:15 and to have summers off. But when you leave work at 3:15 to go home and do all the mom jobs and then have to work for hours in the evening just to be not be drowning....it's not really about the day ending at 3:15. And the teachers I know- the dedicated, amazing teachers- we are burning out. We are feeling the job is impossible. The expectations are too many and too high. We want to do amazing work but there is literally not enough hours in the day. And some of us refuse to miss precious opportunities to be with our own children- fully present, fully getting our butt kicked at Monopoly. How do you handle the work/life balance that comes with being a teacher? Have you found any solutions? We gathered as a faculty, a little over two years ago, to hear a colleague tell us that one of the teachers in our family was facing a crisis. Her 3 year old had just been diagnosed with brain cancer that had spread to the spinal cord. That very same teacher was just days away from giving birth to a baby boy. There were tears and then there were plans. We were teachers- we were used to problem solving and facing impossible odds. How could we help?
The first thing we did was plan a 5K event to raise money. Each grade level created a theme basket to be raffled off at the event. We came together as a school community and the 5K showed our commitment and love for little Bella. Last fall, we gathered again in our faculty room to hear the heartbreaking news that Bella's treatments had failed to work. There was nothing more the doctors could do. But we had to do something to show Bella and her family our love and support. Our holiday party was switched to a fundraiser. Once again, each grade level made themed baskets to raffle off in the hopes that whatever money we raised might support Bella and her family. Last night, as I put my own children to sleep for the evening, the post I was dreading appeared on Facebook. 5 year old Bella had taken her last breath right around dinner time. Though I knew that news was coming, it didn't soften the sadness and heartache of a child gone way too soon after such a hard battle. I can't imagine the pain of not holding your child's hand anymore. Brushing her hair. Sharing laughs and snuggles. As a mom, you know every little part of your child. You make doctors appointments and dentist appointments and sometimes psychologist appointment or orthopedic appointments- you are involved in every health decision facing your child. After a consuming battle with cancer, how do you go from that state to a state where your child is gone from your sight forever? I am sure my faculty will gather again at some point. We will think of a way to help honor Bella's memory and legacy. It's what we do- we come together at hard times. We help each other. There are no blessings in the death of a child but maybe lessons. One lesson here is that outcomes are not guaranteed but love never dies. "And now, I'm glad I didn't know
the way it all would end, the way it all would go. Our lives are better left to chance I could have missed the pain, But I've had to miss the dance." -Garth Brooks When your greatest pain is coupled with your greatest joy, how do you decide if the joy was worth the pain? Would you do it all again if you knew the way it would end? Questions that cannot be answered. Today Luke Perry (Luke Perry!) died. Today I read about the father who killed his wife and two young daughters. Today I await the news of a very sick little girl our community has been praying for. I think about the devastating pain that life can bring And how it is often intertwined with the most joyful moments. I think Garth Brooks is right: "Our lives are better left to chance." It was past bedtime, but a morning snow delay ensured some extra sleeping in time, if needed. While my daughter was already asleep, battling a fever virus all weekend, my son, Alex, was still awake but had just finally agreed to brush his teeth. As he walked past my computer, he stopped to see what I was doing.
On the screen, there were animations that looked a little like the Pokemon characters. It was a math game called Prodigy I had just learned about and was trying out for my third graders. Alex is a second grader but actually the same age as some of my students. With a late fall birthday, we gave him the gift of starting kindergarten at five (turning six) instead of four and so he's a smidge older for the grade. He's also especially good at math and loves all things screens. He asked if he could try, so I turned my little animated Kathleen over to him. The program was super engaging to him- unlocking levels, designing and naming your character and a pet, battling monsters. All the while solving math problems. I could see how this game would be really fun and motivating for my students.Alex solved many tricky problems in his head (while I was using pen and paper to subtract), which was so impressive to me. will introduce Prodigy to my students today. Meanwhile, I made Alex his own account through my class so he could continue practicing his math skills with this fun and engaging game. It's really interesting when your children become the age of the children you teach. For many years (10), I taught kindergarten and my daughter is in kindergarten now. Alex will be a third grader next year but already I can see that he is interested in what my students are doing and special opportunities I create for them, like blogging. It's fun to see how he reacts to trying out what my students will do. Wearing two hats, mom and teacher, it's enlightening to see how decisions a teacher makes can inspire or deflate a student's interests. As a parent, it's the best to see the spark of learning alive in your child and know that flame is being fanned by all the educators in his life. Before I leave for work, I'll show Alex his new username and password for Prodigy. I can't wait for him to tell me all about it. We are sitting at the computer, my almost six year old daughter and me. She is typing another book she created, this one about her Elf on the Shelf, Smiling Max. On the cover, under the pen name she created for herself ("Megan Grace Annie"- only one of those is her actual name), she asks me to type the following:
"Megan is an author and illustrator. She loves to write books. She’s a kindergartener who is always inspired." We print out the book and she goes off to color it, adding new illustrations to the Google images we imported while she typed. And I just love everything about this. I love that she believes that she is an author and an illustrator. No second guesses about not being a good enough writer or artist- she IS these things. I love that she loves it- that writing brings her joy and it is her favorite activity. I love that she is always inspired. How beautiful to live in a way where you are constantly inspired by ideas? Is it weird to want to be more like your daughter when you grow up? He looks at my face for a beat too long, then says, "Are you aware that there is something on your right nostril that-"
"I'm aware," I say, cutting him off. He is my student and we are walking back from P.E. to our classroom. And yes, I am more that aware of the giant cold sore cluster that has erupted on the side of my nose in a painful, oozy, red, hideous way. It's actually been like that since Wednesday but I was at a conference day on Thursday, so perhaps he hadn't looked too closely at me or my nose until just that moment. Kids (eventually) notice everything. A blessing when we are being those amazing role models and being the example we want them to see. A curse when we have those off days, say something we shouldn't, or have an unsightly cold sore eruption. The upside of your nose looking like Rudolph's but worse is that it gives you a sense of appreciation for the nose that normally gets no notice- the part of your face smack in the center that doesn't receive much attention day after day. Like the song goes, "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't no what you got till it's gone...." Coldsore-less nose, I will appreciate you more. |
AuthorKathleen Neagle Sokolowski Archives
February 2024
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