Goal-oriented and task-driven. Now what?

The third day of an empty calendar and no list to check off tasks. The calendar and the list have been the organizers of my days, even on weekends. Typically I would review the list of tasks and prepare for the upcoming meetings, trainings, and collaborations while allowing myself a moment to linger over morning coffee. With a list usually longer than the day, the linger was neither lengthy nor luxurious, but that moment of composing myself was a needed routine.

In my "in-between" state, lingering seems to be self-indulgent, and the worry part of my brain seems to be shouting that I could do more to get to the next era. That part of the cerebrum doesn't seem to measure my next moves in time, but rather in urgency. The irony: now that the linger can be lengthy and luxurious, it doesn't seem to provide the same respite.

Learning to create meaningful goals and tasks that aren't driven specifically by a strategic career move will take me longer than the three days. And the to-do list might just have to fill up with household organization and the fulfillment of the promise I made to myself to purge all the "stuff" that lives in closets and crawl spaces and no longer serves me.

So today I "purged" some Thanksgiving leftovers, and I made some cranberry muffins. Hot and just the right sweet-savory balance, straight from the oven, and perfect with that coffee. The right bite and sip to start my day, and a forced lingering moment to contemplate what's next.

Muffins may be the best I can do on day three. So I'm celebrating a good bake.

 A 13-Year Hiatus

It may be coincidental that I stopped Blogging around the time that I started my role at an EdTech company. I tend to be 100% in all I do, and I willingly was "all-in" as I worked to support students and teachers in accelerating learning through great teaching while using the learning platforms developed by my company. 

The laser-focus on my chosen career meant that other passions peeled away. Music and theatre, my passions from childhood, took a backseat, and I haven't tread the boards or sung a note outside the shower or my Honda in all this time. I stopped running, literally running, and even removed the rack of race completion medals from my home. It was harder to fit in running around the work schedule and the job-related travel, so I became a Peloton groupie, better able to workout in the odd hours when the road to ride or run lived in my spare room on-demand.

And on Tuesday, my 13 year focus on career was dissolved in an instant. A casualty of a corporate "Reduction in Force," I found myself wondering what to do with my mind, my heart, and my body with a sudden wide-open calendar. Job searches in the modern age don't consist of knocking doors, but rather searching remotely, and it's easy to feel like I'm not doing enough. I truly hope that I'll find that next role that can be the one for me. But in the next iteration, I have learned to keep a piece of myself away from the "all-in" spirit.

Of course, on my first full day of unemployment I scoured the job boards, linked myself in, and reconnected with old colleagues who had moved on from the company. But I spent even more time on my teenage passion project on that first day with free time, and I put together an audition for a local musical theatre production. Whether I am cast or not, it felt good to fill my house with song, to assume a character and step outside of myself for awhile,  and to think about telling someone else's story.

And today, as an avid member of the Peloton community, I was able to top a personal record I had on the bike. My humble statistics aren't anything to shout from the mountaintop, but my health journey through migraine, TIA, heart surgery, and complete recovery had set me back, and I wasn't happy with the output numbers I achieved that were so much lower than before. 

But even more than topping that record, today in that "Sweat Steady" ride taught by the phenomenal Jess King, my spirit soared past my previous personal record. As I pedaled, huffed, puffed, and sweated through the class, I listened to her talk about authenticity, owning who you are, kindness, and self-worth. As if she spoke directly to me.

So, no more 13-year hiatus from anything that feels like ME being ME. I'll strive to be the best employee possible in my next company. It's in my DNA. But I have to promise to keep my writing,  sweaty, character-assuming, singing self around too. Because authenticity is integrity, and a RIF has taught me that being me is the best thing I can do.

My Gold Star for the day!

The Final Countdown...

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou

Full day Thursday, half day Friday, and then another group of kids moves on. In the short, short time we have in the classroom, we can't reasonably expect that our lessons will dramatically change the students we teach. Change comes from within. It's also true that you can't make someone learn. Someone has to want to learn.

Reflecting on my first year back in the classroom after 8 years of talking about it, I conclude that there is so much we want to do, and even our greatest efforts feel inadequate. But a belief that I have long held has also re-proven itself. While my students may not recall the lesson I did on metaphor and simile, they may well forget the plural possessive pronoun warm-up we did, and it is doubtful they'll recall the word map strategy we used for vocabulary, there is a memory that endures. Even if we do not remember the content we learned, we will remember how we felt. So regardless of aptitude, I try to work on the attitude. To advance their literacy we need to include some levity. And I hope they do remember how I made them feel, because those are the memories that last.

Drenched

We left the house at 8:15 AM this morning. That is REALLY late to go out for a run in June. Hey, it's Florida! Even though it was a mere 80 degrees, the sun and humidity were intense. At first our pace suffered a little. We're a long way from the gains we were making on our minutes per mile before the surgery and brain events of last year. Somehow, though, once we were totally soaked in our own yuck, it didn't seem to matter anymore. Coming off the trail and back into the neighborhood we ran some intervals, but our per mile time shaved a minute off what we did yesterday, when it was earlier and milder. There's something to earning your sweat, imagining the ill feelings and the toxins departing through the cotton t-shirt and running shorts. What was even better was finishing with a splash. Hosing down by a couple of laps across the backyard pool is a great incentive to pick up the pace on the way home.

We'll go down together...

Hopefully...

The girl and I went to a Weight Watchers meeting, and though I found it hokey, filled with cliched sayings, redundancy, and "breaking news" information that I knew 20 years ago, it may be just what this household needs. The public scale may force honesty in new ways. We already max out our good "Activity Points" but clearly the input is too close to the output. It's a good lesson for both teen and mom, to be healthy and clean.

And thanks to some fabulous apps for our Droid smartphones, Dad is totally into it too. The apps calculate and maintains the food/points/activity diary electronically. Mr. Naysayer, refusing to attend a meeting, is the biggest cheerleader for the plan.

The trick will be to manage this in our fabulously over-scheduled lives. Meals are too often "on wheels" as we fly across town between activities. It will be harder to be clean with a bowl of warm bread and real butter in front of us as we await a carefully calculated salad in a restaurant. But three strong, we have a much better chance than trying to go it alone.

Thy Love and Thy Enemy

What a delicate dance it is, being the mother of a teenage daughter. We need our BFF moments. After all, I adore my girl, and I want our closeness to make her feel comfortable coming to me with anything she needs. I want her to feel like any questions, concerns, school issues, boy issues, and social issues are okay to discuss with me, that I won't yell, judge, or take any dramatic action. Being "cool" mom allows me to approach the inner sanctum, to be let in on the secrets that only her girlfriends might otherwise know. So this means sometimes checking my reaction at the door, maintaining a poker face, and being overly-meticulous and calculated in my responses.

Then there is the mother/daughter adversarial relationship. Mom draws the line. Daughter tries to cross it. Again and again. After all, the BFF wouldn't insist that the assignment be done before the texting, or that the laundry be picked up off the floor this minute or else. Sometimes being the mom means doing the opposite of the BFF, being a whistle-blowing drill Sergeant demanding she Be All She Can Be.

Either way, Mom of a teen is a 24/7/365 job. My waking hours and my short, troubled dreams are full of hopes and worries. I'd like to think that this will all change when she's grown, that adult-to-adult we can do just the BFF thing, that I will be able to quit the tough as nails, and I'll sleep without worry. Time and experience tell me that this is unlikely. We may have more laughs and fewer battles as the lines are redrawn over the next 10-15 years. Standing back and watching her suffer the consequences of her own decisions may require that I be tougher than any drill Sergeant.

Another Workers Comp Claim

This time it's my turn. In my triumphant return to the classroom I've taken on the full range of student-teacher germ transfer. Winter offered upper-respiratory and stomach bugs. My newest delight is the battle against the conjunctivitis that has invaded both of my eyes. Trying to slip in a quick trip to the doc-in-the-box during my planning period, I stopped in the front office to just let the powers that be know I'd be off campus for a bit. They told me to save my co-payment, that pinkeye was a covered workers compensation claim for teachers. Several forms in triplicate later, and I was on my way to Solantic, no cost to me. Sure enough, the yuck is what I thought it was. It was confirmed by a culture. I didn't know they cultured eyeballs these days! Last time I had pinkeye I think I called it in to the doc. The Solantic tech came at me with this little plastic scraper and I experienced an ocular pap smear. Note to self: washing hands, refraining from touching eyes...better than peeper peel. Ugh!

There is no Question Mark about It

So I'm back in the trenches, teaching 6th grade Language Arts. This week we are giving our classroom final, and it is different than all the "High Stakes" testing they have dragged these kids through this year (PMA, FCAT, EOC and other combinations of alphabet soup). On our final we ask them to read, think, and write a response in a complete sentence. "How do we bubble that, Mrs. G?" a student asked me. You don't.

This generation is growing up in a "bubble"mindset. Twelve years old and they turn in sentences without capital letters or punctuation. In my book that's not a complete sentence. Period.

Pain

Childbirth hurt a lot, but I really don't remember that pain. The events that occurred one year ago today hurt a lot more. Watching the clock this evening, remembering where I was and what I was thinking, exactly one year ago tonight, I can feel it again. The dread, the regret, the anger, the disbelief. This wasn't supposed to happen yet. And somehow it didn't.

And a year passed. Somehow, we got back into the normalcy of living. Worrying about the everyday, bringing the trash to the curb on Thursday night, it's your turn to change the cat litter, time to sit down and pay the bills. A whole year we have had that we shouldn't have had, and sometimes we have to remind ourselves about that thing that happened last year. We look back like rubber-neckers at the scene of a crash. But it was our crash, and it very nearly destroyed our entire world.

I don't need to feel that pain, but I can't ever forget it entirely. Remembering what could've been forces me to celebrate what is.

Musings from Under the Umbrellas

Even with two umbrellas over me, I managed a sunburn today. I barely moved from the chair. Feet in the sand, earbuds in, and recline position locked down, I had the loveliest of naps today. In an intermittent web browse (thank you Droid phone) I learned that the hateful anti-teacher legislation most definitely originated from Jeb Bush, and that there has been a decent amount of funding from Publix and Office Depot. I will have to investigate further, because I really may need to find a new place to shop.

A relaxing day was in order. I have no idea what the future may possibly hold, hateful anti-teacher legislation or not, my job or not, more consulting or not, but I'm much better at turning off the worry switch. For now I'll be savoring every moment of this vacation with my family.

April 3- Swim Date

Now it feels like break: a trip to the nursery, 3 hours of power-washing and the official opening of the pool season in our backyard. The water temperature is 74, the air temperature is 84 and I am sporting my first homeowner's sunburn of the year. Ev planted about 76 zinnias and a couple of roses too. We had grilled steak and chicken, and a salad so big it took two people to spin it. Tomorrow, beach date.

Lesson De-Planned

Teaching vocabulary has been fun. In our class we are working on fabulous adjectives, replacements for the "baby words" of elementary school. Not happy or sad anymore, my sixth grade charges are elated or melancholy, thank you. The kids seem to take joy in tossing in these words into conversation and into their writing, often sharing the same sentences with street, slang, or southernisms. We play vocabulary games, use graphic organizers, make vocabulary cartoons, and our pre-holiday celebration was a rousing game of vocabulary Jeopardy!

I feel confident that these kids will know these words forever, and maybe some of them will even be bitten by the wordie bug and become interested in other intriguing words.

But with the proposed new plan for educational evaluation, I might find little use in these activities, for these words would be of no value unless they happen to be among the specifically tested material on the high-stakes assessment. Too bad. They actually seem to be enjoying both the process and the product of their learning.

We're gonna' make it after all...oh, no we're not...

Education reform, bold in its intentions, purportedly designed to close achievement gaps and to guarantee that every child at every grade level has achieved a standard gain in skills as determined by uniform assessments. The same assessments are given to every child at the same time in a particular grade. One-size-fits-all accountability, but the legislation also mandates the best practice of differentiation, perhaps creating 25 or more simultaneous individualized lessons while managing the physical, emotional and medical needs of the delightful, squirrely, and unpredictable children in our care.



I'm all in favor of making education the best it can be. As a teacher I constantly strive to innovate and to seek out the latest and best-proven strategies for helping each student to succeed. I work hard to craft lessons that engage, activate prior knowledge, encourage students to make connections, work with some level of autonomy, and have room for expressing their responses with a nod to their different learning styles and multiple intelligences. I do my best to stretch the rigid standards to allow for different levels of "readiness" to achieve success in our everyday activities. I make my decisions based on my knowledge of the students in my classes as acquired by data, observation, and my study of the content. It is my sincere goal that every student grows, no thrives while in my charge.The evaluation of my performance should be based on the work that I do, my lessons, my contact and cooperation with parents, my interactions with students, my professional knowledge in action on a day-to-day basis.



I would never write off a child, but those of us who have been around education know that there are some that may just not be ready to blossom during the fraction of time they are in our classes. Standardized education and its timetables, curriculum maps and learning calendars are misguided attempts to move kids down the assembly line. The truth is there can be a Teaching Calendar, but learning happens at different paces. Our students begin with many different starting lines, some way ahead, some further back, and the overwhelming majority of teachers I have met in both my teaching and educational consulting careers want every child to finish the marathon successfully.



And there are unspoken truths. Truth: The most powerful factors that affect a child's education are often outside the classroom. Truth: I differentiate instruction and design effective lessons, yet there are always students who don't bother to complete them.



Another unspoken truth: kids are different. I am the parent of a child who should be genetically designed for academic achievement. There are more teachers in her family than any other profession, both parents included. Our house is text-rich, we provide her cultural experiences, and this only child was raised in an environment of inclusive conversation, not by the Nickelodeon Network. Yet she's an educational minimalist, unmotivated by grades, taking a dispassionate view of most academic subjects. Because of her under performance on these standardized assessments our neighborhood high school would exclude her from the areas where she soars, the "extras." Thank goodness she's in an Arts School, a place where she can thrive in her passions while still being prodded along to maintain her studies.



So these bold reforms are for the children, right? Don't pay the teachers unless their students succeed on the tests. Restrict the curriculum so kids have a double or triple schedule of the subjects in which they fall behind. Eliminate the extras, and focus on the basics. That would be the plan for disaster for my child.



What really motivates this plan? In this Time Magazine opinion, Bloomberg and Klein tout reforms in NY City, proclaiming that "Sure, experience matters," but that the system that offers protection to veteran professionals is flawed and that the hope for the future is the "Energetic, new teacher." Experience matters? It's essential. So is the plan designed to help students, or to cycle in the energetic (less expensive) teacher and cycle out those protected by seniority(more expensive)? Teachers are to blame when the safety nets of society fail to catch the children. Clearly, the problem in education is the high teaching salary.

The salary was never high, it was barely a living wage. And now my two teaching income family is in real jeopardy. I cannot build a stable future for my family based on the work ethic and environmental factors that affect the performance of the children in my classroom. I cannot budget pay my bills and fund my child's college, my retirement, and my obligations to pay taxes and contribute to society. If you want to evaluate me, I say fine. Scrutinize my data and lesson books, observe me, put a camera in my classroom if you need to. But evaluate my performance. And for this household, with its two former teachers-of-the-year, willing to forgo the earning power of other professions to pursue the passion of the less lucrative teaching career, we find ourselves wondering what is our plan B?

A little post

I wish I had the energy to blog daily, but I've truly just returned home after leaving the house at 6:30 AM. And this isn't a complaint. I am blessed to be so busy. Busy with a good job and plenty of extra-curriculars. This weekend we celebrated health and the good life with our 4th Gate River Run, slower than the last, quicker than the first, but most importantly together for always. My post today, brief, tired, and grateful. And now, before bed, I must book the travel to bring my daughter to a Senior High School Prom, the likely topic of many a future post.

Listing 3:41 AM

Maybe it's the fact that I miss the therapy of the blog, or maybe it's the music running through my head, from Schubert to Sondheim, my brain perpetually practicing. Maybe it's the silence caused by my ear infection, or the 1/2 glass of Merlot at dinner, in combination with the decongestant and antibiotic. It could be the frustration over my viral school computer loaded with the next several weeks' lesson plans. Whatever it is, I am sitting at our home computer in the wee hours, two sleepy-eyed and confused cats at my feet. Without the daily routine, my head bursts with blog possibilities: the latest teen daughter developments, a new set of personal physical failings, the upcoming Gate River Run (our fourth), the one-year anniversary of the husband's lifting incident, and not least of all the anxiety and excitement found in my reunion with music and performing. Too many topics whirl around for me to dig into just one. I'll settle for this list, my self-indulgent little piece of writing about sitting and writing, and then return to the bed with the sleeping husband, confused cats, and warm compress to my infected ear.

Street Cred

With this week of consulting I've been considering how my schtick may have changed now that I'm a "real" teacher again. I really don't think that it has. I never thought that participants in my seminars would take all I say as The Word and The Truth. As an attendee in such trainings myself, I always thought that getting one good idea would make my time worthwhile. With this knowledge I have always worked hard to try to find an idea that may work for each teacher in attendance. In my nearly 8 years of consulting I never lived under the delusion that teachers were working under the best of conditions. The truth is, most of them work under conditions that are far worse than mine! I am in a school with wonderful kids, a supportive administrator, and really thoughtful and intelligent colleagues. Next year, maybe I'll be a full time consultant, a full time teacher, or a hybrid like this year. Either way, I think I've seen enough of the front line of education to be credible, street or not.

Burning

I am excited/horrified at the number of commitments I have made for my extra-curricular activities. Thrilled to be singing, learning repertoire, and getting ready to perform as I may be, I mourn the long-ago days of college when waking up to practice was about all I had to do. Back then there were no worries of ESOL, grading papers, or mortgage payments. Oh well, at least with the end of The Oliver Adventure I have a little more time to wiggle. I really wish I could be a 50% person, but I find that I throw myself into everything and expect the most , not satisfied when my performance doesn't reach the 100% of my expectations. I feel that way about my teaching too, though age and exhaustion (and maybe a little wisdom) have granted me the permission to exhale and assess the situation before I berate myself too badly. I can only do the most I can do with the conditions dealt to me. Anything more than that would require superpowers, and my cape never came in the mail. Funny... another teacher I know (like maybe, the BEST teacher I ever knew) must not have realized that they give us books, not capes. Yet somehow she can fly, and take the kids along with her, and still not miss a beat as a supermom back at home. Like me, I guess, feeling that 100% sometimes isn't enough.

Little Boxes

Technically, I am in a state of mourning, but today I found a lot to smile about. I guess I'm getting better at compartmentalizing my feelings. Usually I feel them all at once, which gives the bad endless opportunities to trump the good. I've been working on postponing my worrying to a designated worry time, and allowing happy to flow freely. There are certainly worries and bad things to fear: death, financial ruin, employment uncertainty, and the perils of raising a teenage daughter, to name a few. Today, though, the weather is warmer, I enjoyed a week of teaching some awesome kids, I have new music to learn, and I have a whole weekend full of family, music, theater, walking/running and friendship ahead of me. The apocalypse can wait.

And then there were none

A long day without a moment to think. Out of the house at 6:45 AM and home at 11 PM, I am thankful that the sun rises earlier now, and I am home for a tiny bit of daylight. Not much light shining for the family today though, with the passing today of my final grandparent. Though the grandma I knew had been gone for many years, her mind some other place and her body still here with us, her passing marks the passing of a generation. I keep thinking about the photos she shared with such pride. She and her sisters, real "lookers" in their not-at-all revealing swimsuits on the Long Island beaches between the wars. Meeting my Grandpa, a honeymoon and shipping out, and my dad, a wartime baby whose picture was carried in the pocket of my Grandpa serving in the Pacific. He was nearly 3 when they finally met face-to-face. My grandpa, a war veteran, but a man who said little of war or anything else. That's okay, because Grandma said it all for both of them. She was a woman on a mission for as long as I remember. Whether it was getting the city to cut down trees, fighting for grocery bargains, or some function at "The Center" her elder years were active. Our long trips from New York to Virginia were met with pot roasts and recycled family jokes. The house full of pictures and random family treasures, the matriarch on my father's side, and another piece of my childhood now lives only in my heart and in my memory.

Doing my Duty (Thanks for the picture, MJ)

I missed a day of blogging yesterday, but that's okay. I've been busy doing my duty. Whether it's turning a 3 day weekend into a 1 day weekend to travel and pick up some consulting work, or finishing out an ill-fated theatre project, staying at school until 5:30 to grade projects, or counting the 'tweens as they head off to their bus ride home (pictured) , I've been doing my duty. A bit too much duty lately, though, and neglecting of myself. Blogging, practicing, running, that's for me, and I have a duty to myself to indulge.