I knew stepping back into the classroom after 5 years out would be work. I'm not one to stray away from hard work or long hours, I mean I worked on my Master's degree while having the most busy, stressful role I've had in all my professional education years yet, while my husband traveled for his profession and still managed our home and family events with 3 daughters, one that was only a year old then. So, no stranger to hard work, but for some reason finding that balance hasn't been so easy this school year so far.
If you're not familiar with education, let me see if I can paint a verbal picture you can imagine. The teacher has countless meetings during their "planning period" each day that include content planning with their team, IEP meetings for special education students, parent meetings by phone, email, and in person for families to stay up with their child's learning, along with actual teaching, managing resources, time, behaviors, temperaments, in some cases changing hormones of kids, personalities and conflicts, as well as, other staff to handle situations with. It's very much like looking at your computer suddenly and realizing that you have 90 tabs open in your internet browser and all of them are important. I saw a student this past week on the ground building a sandcastle in the middle of the soccer field, while about thirty other boys were running around them playing soccer dodging them and I said to myself, "That's how I feel right now."
My youngest daughter is six years old and for the first time ever in my kid's schooling, we made a change to accommodate me, so that I could work closer to home. The last thirteen years I was at the same school, so my oldest and middle one had a very stable schooling environment. My youngest has been telling me that she hates school and as I listen to her and try to figure out why, because she has the sweetest teacher I could ever imagine, I began to understand that she is saying this because of the workload that I carry that takes time away from her. She's begging for my attention, along with my other two daughters and husband. See the location hasn't changed my work ethic. I still work hard, long hours trying to be excellent at everything I put my hand to. I'm a perfectionist in some areas of my life, and that involves my work. But in that perfectionism, I'm leaving the most important people behind to do tasks and it's driving me crazy. See the reason I love education so much, is that it's a people business, not a task business and as an educator, we can get so caught up in the task of teaching, the task of planning, the task of meetings, etc, that we forget about the people involved and our own families.
So while I will follow this:
So, this October, I'm learning to balance. You'd think that after 18 years I'd have learned this by now, but each new year presents its own challenges and learning happens all over again. I hope you get to enjoy some family time as well!
