What do you do?

What do you do when everything, except your very life, has been sucked out of you?  What do you when the passion you have felt for something for so long has slowly drained out of you like water from an overturned bucket?  First a slow steady trickle and then it just drips, one drop at a time, until there is nothing left but an empty bucket...

What do you do when you have spent countless hours planning each lesson, penciling in those lesson plans only to change the next day because they day you just finished didn't quite work out the way you wanted?  What do you do when you have spent countless Sundays up in your classroom, scrutinizing lesson plans that you think will work and then changing your mind because your just not sure if they will grasp that topic and you think you have found something better?  So you throw all those papers away you just made copies of and start all over, even though you were almost done.

What do you do when you have attended numerous meetings, formal and informal, about a student who isn't succeeding?  You have documented, and communicated with parents, and had heart-to-hearts with the student, and talked with other teachers, and made a plan, and then made a new plan, and then another new plan because the first two didn't work.  Not because they were bad plans, but because the student forgot, or the student didn't complete what they were supposed to, or because the student didn't follow through with their part of the plan.

What do you do when you have spent three days on a topic, provided direct teach, provided guided practice, provided independent practice, provided examples, modeled, and done everything except do the work for them, and then it is time for them to finally complete the assignment alone and they look at you say "What are we supposed to do?"

What do you do when you have asked them, more than once, to stop holding their side conversations and complete their work that you have let them do in groups, with their friends, because you  know that is one way they will be successful and they look at you and say "Mrs. Wagner, you really expect me to do this right now?" because they have looked at the clock and there is 20 minutes left in class?  To them class is over.

What do you do when you have cried, both with colleagues and alone in your room at night, because you know this passion you had called teaching, is gone.  It is gone and you no longer want to get out of bed because everything you do feels pointless.

What do you do?

You get up the next day and teach anyway.

Because I cannot not let go of that one little hope that I will reach at least one student in one tiny way and they will learn something they didn't know before.  Even in an overturned bucket, there is a little puddle left in the way back that just can't reach the edge...

Spring

Why are we so afraid to start over?

I began thinking about this yesterday as I was driving to meet a friend.  I know numerous people who are going through some tough times in their lives and they are going to have to start over...like I did two years ago.  In talking with them and their comments about "Now I have to start over" I thought---why is that a bad thing?

We look at starting over as such a negative thing.  My students can't stand not getting it "right" the first time so most of the time they won't even try.  Projects, businesses, relationships all have this pressure to work perfectly the first time.  Yet, how many times do people say "If I had the chance to do it all over again..."? Where would we be if people like Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Michael Jordan, and the hundreds of others that have changed the world for us had never started over? (And they had to start over hundreds of times!)

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Jeremiah 29:11

The Earth starts over every year at this time.  We look at spring as a new beginning, a fresh start after a bleak winter.  Maybe we should start looking at failures the same way.  Sure, we have to go through the depression, the hurt, and worse, the uncertainty of what the future holds.  But instead of saying "I HAVE to start over" lets say "I GET to start over."  Lets count ourselves lucky and embrace it as something that sometimes others don't get--a second chance.  I know I'm going to try hard to think this way.

Enjoy your spring.  For in life, it doesn't always come more than once.