I wish I would make myself write every day. I am happier when I write every day. However,
I also believe that the level of chronic sleep-deprivation in which I exist is
not healthy, so I should average more than five hours of sleep a night. I also wish I could/would exercise more. Who in a million years would have thought I
would fail to exercise enough? It’s true,
though. And I wish I cooked more healthy meals and ate less sugar. So there are
a number of things I wish I would differently, but the truth is that I am
sincerely, honestly doing the best I can. Every day. And I’m not yet where I
hope to go.
That said, in the last couple of days, there has been some
evidence that while I’m failing on a number of fronts, I’m not failing all of
the time. Since my self-talk tendency is to beat myself up about not being all
that I know I should be, I should keep track of those victories and pull them
out when the failures become too overwhelming.
Maybe Victory #1:
The best victories are probably the ones that felt all along like
failures. Physical therapy has felt like
a failure. At least one morning a week
my back and hips hurt so much that I can barely function. So much that I dread
living. It’s not the sort of pain that makes me scream; it’s not sharp. It’s just so darn debilitating. And it ruins
my quality of life. It’s why I went to
Dr. Turner’s office in the first place. And since it always was mysterious and
not every morning, it didn’t seem to be getting much better. In fact, Tuesday morning was bad. So I went
into my reevaluation on Wednesday but very sleep deprived and pessimistic.
The results of the reevaluation, however, showed that my
strength in key moves has become much more balanced and much closer to what it
would need to be for me to successfully run at all. There is clear, numerical
data that shows that I have improved. On
top of that information, though, my physical therapist really heard me when I
said my pain wasn’t gone.
Tuesday night, though, I had tested the alignment of my hips
as my PT had showed me. They were really off.
So I did the exercise I am supposed to do in the morning to align them.
I woke up feeling better. I’ve been
doing it every night, and I haven’t had a really bad morning since. Hmm. Maybe
I’ve finally found the “thing” that will make my life less painful.
Victory #2: Thursday morning was the Breakfast of Champions. It was televised, and I was oddly nervous. I don’t even like to
leave messages on answering machines and voice mail systems. Oh well.
I presented one of my students as student of the month for the English
department, and she was thrilled. When I had told her (the week before
spring break) that I was nominating her as the student of the month from the
English department, not only did her face light up (I think that might be
literal), I had the impression that she also lifted off the floor. She was so elated. That's what counts and why
I got up at 4am and talked on TV.
Afterwards, her mom
told her to tell me what she's decided to be professionally. She was shy
about it. She wants to be an English teacher. I didn't know that.
So I asked where she wants to go for training, and she said that if she
can get scholarships (which she knows is how I went there,) she wants to go to
Illinois Wesleyan.
Bam.
I had been dragging myself through the
week without direction or sleep. It was a rough one. Hearing, though,
that one of my students has been inspired to not just major in English but want
to teach it makes it all worth it. I am pleased with my rating on my evaluation
this year, but even so, I think that maybe one measure of how I am doing is how
many of my students decide that they are going to major in English and/or
become English teachers. My count is pretty good. I actually learned
this year that a student who I had at WWS as a freshman, whose mom called me
out of nowhere to say that I had ignited her daughter's enthusiasm for school,
became an English teacher and teaches at a middle school in the same district
where I teach.
Given that my job is the reason I’m not
doing all of the things I mentioned in the first paragraph that would mean I
was living life as I believe I should almost exclusively because of my job, I’m
not sure whether or not I’m doing my students a service in making them all want
to do what I do. On the other hand,
there are some powerful rewards associated with the job as well: for example,
inspiring young people to because English teachers.
Victory #3:
Wednesday was the first meeting of the literature circle project my honors
students are going to undertake. They had decided on the books the week before
spring break, and their assignment was to obtain the book. That’s it.
Just get it. On Wednesday they were going to come up with a reading
schedule. In many groups, no one had obtained the book. This by itself is somewhat annoying, but they
are teenagers and to some extent that behavior isn’t shocking. What was
shocking, however, was that I repeatedly had conversations with students that
led me to believe that they do not know how to use public libraries. Some of the books the students needed were in
our school LRC. (As a side note, I did find it annoying that students claimed
to have no access to the books that they then found in the LRC after a
five-minute search. They were clearly not trying.) Some books were not in the
LRC, however, or there were not enough copies. In addition, some had also
already been checked out from the public library. It did not occur to those
students to request additional copies through inter-library loan. My students
seemed unaware that such a thing existed. I left school (to go to the PT
reevaluation I was dreading) believing that most of my students do not ever go
to libraries. Ugh.
The third quarter SSR projects were due on Friday, and given
the weird resistance I had been encountering all week, I was not looking
forward to that due date. When it came,
however, the projects that were turned in (which is not all that should have
been) were really well done. The answers are thoughtful and make me believe
that at least many of my students actually
read and enjoyed a book! In addition, in the short reports they wrote about
them, their grammar seemed to have improved.
Either I am an awesome teacher and I have changed my students or there
is something about the less formal task that allowed them to just write, and it
turns out they can!! It feels like a victory on two fronts. Maybe their grammar
improved because they had been reading?
Take-away: I should continue to assign such independent reading
projects. I should do one every quarter.
Just a funny story:
My last story from the week is neither a victory nor (I don’t think) a defeat.
I cannot remember quite how it started. My memory of it begins with me telling
Gary that I don’t know what I like in a wine.
I just know that there are some I like and some I don’t like. Gary asked
where I live and invited me to a wine tasting on Sunday, but I cannot go. I
also said I wouldn’t know what I was doing at a tasting and I certainly couldn’t
drink very much but wouldn’t enjoy spitting.
Gary, our nominee for Kane County Teacher of the Year, determined to
teach me. I think Gary maybe believes he can teach anyone anything, and he may
not be wrong. An important factor, however, might be context.
In this case, Gary decided that we would practice tasting
wine with some flat ginger ale sitting on the counter in the English
department. He poured us both a few swallows
of the old pop in big red plastic cups also left over from the meeting. He
demonstrated the sniffing, the swirling, and a rather disgusting-sounding
process of swishing the “wine” around in the mouth. I refused to do that, so he
said I could swish it more quietly and with my mouth closed. I did. He asked me
where in my mouth I “felt” it. (I think
he said “felt,” but I’m not sure if this is the right terminology. See earlier
comment about context.) I said it was in the front of my mouth, and Gary said
that was correct! I was surprised I was
right, but pleased. “Where else is it?”
asked Gary. I said it was on the insides of my teeth. Right again!
Then the questions got harder. Apparently a good wine has
balance of fruit, body and acidity, so Gary wanted me to assess each quality of
the ginger ale. I did not do so well. I
was instructed to take another sip and this time really swish it around, chew
it, breath it, and try again. As I was in the process of doing this, and as
Gary was pontificating about these three qualities, my evaluating administrator
walked in the door. I was facing him, as I swished ginger ale around my mouth,
but Gary’s back was to him. So he kept
talking about how to taste and talk about wine.
He kept talking. Gary is a difficult many to interrupt or derail, and so
the administrator stood behind him listening and waiting for him to move. So
yes, he saw and heard me doing a “wine” tasting in the English office, as
instructed by Gary. Someone, I think, assured him it was ginger ale.
So, yeah. That happened. There is some fun in my
life.
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