become the phenomenal teacher my students deserve to have

so, i have this friend and coworker. we are leaving the school at the same time, and i’ve noticed that her desk is significantly cleaner than mine. she is uberorganised. i am realising that one of the keys to being a really good teacher is getting a handle on organisational skills.

all that time saved could go somewhere good.
and all that stress of where-the-heck-oh-yeah-i’ll-get-to-that could be transformed into positive energy.

that’s got to be a good thing.

any tips for the terminally disorganised, artsy type with a bad case of packrattery?

this is like the goal of a million nested goals.

okay there are two things competing to be written right now and they are bouncing back and forth in my head, vying for jockey position on the keyboard. one is a realisation, the other is a story. perhaps it would be good to start with the story, becaue the realisation will have me rambling and i won’t want to share the story after.

okay, so, here i am, still in tanzania for another two months. but i am in the home stretch at school. due to a rescheduling of tanzania’s mainland elections, school is closing a few days early. december thirteenth. that is…goodness, that is sixteen days away and there is a long weekend somewhere in there. yikes!

anyway…

because school is closing soon, and because i finally told the kiddoes that i wouldn’t be back in the new year (it’s a long story, but i am moving back to canada for a while), my grade eleven students threw me a surprise party on friday.

the whole thing was really very moving. they had things to say and we danced and ate cake and they gave me a wall hanging for my home back home that involves handprints. i was actually rendered speechless. i don’t get speechless, if anything i get more verbose in such situations, but, really, i had nothing to say.

it was obvious from the gesture that there was a lot of love in that room. i think they’re great, they think i’m great. we have a mutual admiration society going and i wonder what i will do in their absence.

perhaps because i am actually a rather dark individual, i couldn’t help but find interesting the fact that today (sunday) i feel like a total ass. like i am nowhere near where and who i need to be to deserve that kind of thing from the kids. so this moves into the realisation.

while it is tempting for me to write that in order to be that phenomenal person that my students deserve to have stand in front of them, i need to check a few more of these goals off: get that ironman done, the book, a few more degrees, to live more closely to the ideals i espouse to believe, etc., i have come to see that what i need to do is allow for the process of realising those dreams to be enough. it’s not the having done. it is the doing.

as is the process of realising this one.

sure, i’d love to be one of those people that is solid. secure. worthy. i mean, on paper, i appear to live the kind of life many people dream of. the truth is, that is not who i am, or where i am at for myself. and the further truth is that i am not going to ever be that kind of person. not really. i’m too much a seeker, too much a dreamer for that. too restless…

so…now i guess i gotta be more okay with not being okay all the time.

does any of this make sense?

okay. i’m gonna sign off here, because this is just blahblahblahing…

so, things at work lately have been pretty tough. your standard run-of-the-mill school politics, exacerbated ten-fold by pending deadlines, our compressed academic year and the standard issue with resource management that seems endemic to my current place of employment.

for a moment i thought about leaving the profession.

i always knew that i would need to work for a pretty special administrative team. one doesn’t take up a career in precisely the thing she has spent almost her entire life repudiating without support. i figured there would be issues at some point, but i didn’t think i would face them so soon.

well, i took a deep breath, turned from the admin building, where i found myself unwittingly engaged in a power-struggle with my new headmistress, and headed toward the classroom where i meet with my advisor-advisee group twice a week.

in less than a second i was on my knees thanking all things holy for the privilege of working with these amazing people. how could i have lost sight so easily?

it was a very illuminating moment.
i have a long way to go down this path.

i just got appraised.

what an eye opening experience that was. i’d write more here, but my internet connection is quite crap at present, and i am not sure if this will even upload.

here’s hoping…

i’ve had a wonderful couple of weeks back in the classroom with the kiddoes. before returning to school, i was concerned that because i have so many more students this year than i did last year but that has not been the case.

these past weeks, i discovered that within the heart is infinite space.

the kids are amazing and bring me more joy than i could ever reciprocate.

every day is a new day
every face is a new student
every lesson is a new challenge

when i went into teaching, i knew forgiveness would be part of the package. but at the time i figured i’d be ‘forgiving’ students for stepping on my ego. what i’ve come to discover is that the harder forgiveness in teaching is to forgive one’s self the ignorance, shortsightedness, lapses in expressed irritation, unpreparedness, feeling too tired to put in one hundred percent from time to time, and all the other imperfections that come with circumstance; because, if those things all add up and pull energy, what’s left for the students?