Tuesday, sometime in summer

I really don’t have anything to say today, except that summer has truly arrived.

On the left – still to go. On the right, completed!

This is where I spent a few hours today.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Yet again, the words that I wanted to say or write were given to me by someone else.  Here’s is today Poem of the Day from poem-a-day@poets.org.

Hope Ali Liebegott

 

always the hopeless asked to give others hope the ones pushed up against wall after wall when you’re done unpinning yourself from the wall, please give hope those who work twice as hard to seem half as good being asked to do one more thing we need to be seen because things are not going well and the crows are up to no good

While Ali was writing about the marginalized, women and people of color, these words spoke to my educator’s heart of the last week.   I couldn’t believe how well Ali’s words captured what I have been feeling.  After being pushed up against walls and peeling myself off to go in for another day at the office, I start again each day with trying to give hope.  While I am sad and frustrated, I still get up each day and give my best to my students.  I am there with a smile on my face and the same commitment to make it a worthwhile day for them.

And I work twice as hard, sometimes far more than twice as hard, but am expected to do more and be more and not be recognized for what I do accomplish.  I am expected to give, but not expect anything in return.  Things are not going well.

And I can relate to those crows.  They are in fact grackels who are usually gone by this time of year but we can hear them yelling, truly yelling, at each other from tree to tree in our back yard.  It was deafening and somewhat irritating last night.  I feel like those grackels are circling around me sometimes; I am doing my work and doing more than my work again and again and again but no one is really listening or acknowledging.  They are just yapping and yelling at each other way up above trying to get all of the attention.

Thank you Ali, for your words.  I am not alone.

Tuesday, June 13th, 2017

When they want you but they don’t want you.  What a strange place to be.  It’s worse than a rock and hard place because you can’t move the rock and you can’t maneuver out of the hard place because someone else is caving it in on you.

It has been made clear to me that I do not belong where I am and I am tolerated at best.  But I am very, very good at what I do.  I am told this continually by colleagues and by leaders, by students and by parents, by peers and cohorts.  I know that I know what I am doing and that I do it well.

That creates both the hard place and the rock.  I am too good to be allowed to go because I am good enough to leave.  So I am stuck – here in no man’s land.  This is not the way I intended to start my summer, or spend my summer.

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

TANKA TUESDAY

 

Inside my tennis hat brim

“Do what you love”, it challenges me

“Love what you are doing.”

I do love exactly what I do

I just struggle to love doing it

 

Sometimes the strangest things speak to you, like the inside of a Life Is Good hat.  It told me just those words above and I had an aha moment.  I love teaching.  I love the smells of a school, the walls of a classroom, the hugs and eyes and movements and words of the students.  I truly love everything about it.  When I am teaching, the rest of the world disappears and I am in my flow.  It’s my zen place, my happy place.

This past year, however, I have not been loving doing it.  Mostly because it involves so much more than just the students and the classroom and school building.  All of the otherness has beaten me down in a surprising way.  So, I am trying to find a way to bring back the love of doing it.  I have thrown the dice up in the air, hoping they land in a new arrangement that will lead me to again love doing what I love to do.