A Day Off (sort of)

Today I got to call in a sub to attend the annual Shakespeare Workshop to help begin to prepare DPS teachers for the 2013 Shakespeare Festival in April. This entails a 9-2:30 commitment, with a lovely lunch and breakfast, a two hour, hands-on drama lesson with the Denver Center for Performing Arts, and the company of other equally as engaged with Shakespeare teachers from across the district. I also added in an extra hour and a half of sleep, a long shower, a trip to the coffee shop to catch up on grad school work, and a definite commitment to going to yoga tonight. This was a DREAM compared to the ten hour days I've been putting in the last few weeks, with 7am meetings, rehearsals and waiting for parents at school until 5pm, calling multiple middle school students' parents regarding bad behavior, kindengarteners starting fights and peeling gum off my classroom floor and walls, driving to school in the dark, driving home in traffic in the dark.. ugh, this time of year it seems like the list of my complaints is endless. Thinking about making today a bit more about me, and not as much about my 100+ students of the moment and my drama club overall felt refreshing. Although it scares me to admit, what if I am already after 3 1/2 years realizing I am not cut out for this career in teaching? Unfortunately, the statistics are not in my favor. It is proven that teachers start to leave their jobs after 4 years due to burn out. Under appreciation, over working, and not enough pay leads to once inspired classroom leaders to want to find something more fulfilling for the pocket book and for the soul. Not that I don't get a lot out of what I am doing. Lately, more and more I see that I "get it" I do know how to teach my content and I know how to catch the kids that think they aren't into drama. I know how to solve classroom management problem issues, I know how to set up good classroom structures, and communicate directions with energy and positivity. And there are days (some days) that I end a class or go home feeling confident that I made a difference, and I can chalk it up as a "good day." However, I am beaten down, easily irritable, easily upset and prone to negativity by this time of the year. My emotions take a toll from being cut off most of the day with my students, and co-workers that when I have an outlet, I take it. And I am discouraged about how much longer I can neglect the needs I have personally. When have I put in enough time in the classroom when I can walk away without any guilt or regret? Is this a selfish idea to want to give myself a little more grace and care throughout the week? Am I doing enough to take care of myself right now, am I just hitting a hormonal point that is causing all of this to come out? Am I not being challenged enough in the ways I want to be challenge? Maybe I won't know all the answers to these questions until I take a break from teaching and see how it feels to not call a classroom my own for a year. Or maybe I owe it to myself and my students to stick it out and give them my best for a few more good years before I have to balance my own children with a career. All I know is I am tired. I am not sleeping because my brain keeps me awake with lists, solutions, problems, ideas, and possible catastrophes. How do teachers teach for 10+ years? That makes me even more tired thinking about it.

NIght before Election 2012

I remember that November day in 2008, there was a different atmosphere every where I went. Maybe it was because I was living and existing within the liberal and academic confines of a university, but I remember that victorious and liberating sense that hung about Minneapolis like it like it was yesterday. My class mates and I had worked hard in sorting out our own thoughts and responsibilities in voting in our first presidential election. Mine was made up of a few experiences, such as losing my job at an independent business due to the economic downturn, participating or observing worker's strikes on campus, participating in political performances and many lucid conversations with friends in college and friends from studying overseas. Being a campaign volunteer, and a Chicago-bred girl also helped the victor's cause as I was a bleeding heart Obama fan, ready to cast my vote for change. Flash forward four years later to my 25-year old self, to my classroom in Denver within an urban public school district. Now I am a current graduate student with 3 1/2 years teaching under my belt, working hard to close the racial and socioeconomic achievement gap, dutifully paying my taxes, using my health care plan as an independent, exercising my specific rights as a female, and doing my share to contribute to the American society. And may I add that the things I have experienced just in the last four years have transformed me into someone completely different than who I was four years ago when I cast my first vote. I have been exposed to the difficulties the economy has presented to low to middle class families. I have witnessed the difficulties that complicated immigration policies present. I have seen injustice within the American school system and I have been a part of the after effects from NCLB. This has made me wary and worried about the status of Americans, primarily with equity and accessibility for all citizens to a good, healthy and happy life. With all this being said, I still do have a lot yet to experience. More things to come that will shed even more light on the government and its connections to me. However I feel refreshed to take a step back and realize how much more affected and more informed I am this round, and confident about how I am casting my vote and how it will impact my future. On the night before the 2008 presidential election, I sat down and wrote about communication, and human interactions. Perhaps mostly because I was performing my first big civic duty of participating in democracy, to have my voice heard and my vote counted. Perhaps also I was heavily engaged in theater-based classes and soaking in new information like a greedy sponge every day. But in my reflections that night, I also charged my community with an important task that I myself in the last four years have failed to fulfill, so I am not about to blame our president for falling short on any of his promises. My much more insightful and empathetic self actually said, "No matter where you are, there is no harm in speaking with people about their world-view. Being as informed as you possibly can only makes you more confused, but it can also only offer an exchange to inform the less informed. Speaking with people, body to body, face to face and creating a chain of real story-telling I think is the most conducive way to START change, somewhere in the world at least. Build space for mutual respect and share your own history." Yikes, Caroline. Then how come you haven't been engaging with others about this election? Yes of course, engaging with friends who share the same views. Definitely engaging with my students, from the ages of five to fifteen, about who would THEY vote for and why, and asking them why I should vote for who I will vote for. Engaging with my parents and close family who I already knew agreed with me in the first place. Engaging with my boyfriend in a few challenging conversations, who tends to reject politics because of the devisiveness it causes within his family. But have I been trying to "informed the less informed?" I wouldn't put 4th graders into the less informed category, necessarily because they cannot vote. Back the train up, have I made myself as informed as I can possibly be? I wish I could do better. I wish I took time to speak with others who have different perspectives than I do, to understand their stories more thoroughly, and to challenge my own thinking. I teach my students to think that way, why can't I practice it myself? The public has been quick to size up Obama's '08 promises to the results he has presented since he was elected. But before we are so quick to consider his failures, perhaps we should check on our own. When resolutions or promises have you failed to maintain over the past four years? Over the past year, six months, week? How often do you hold yourself accountable to living the values that you hold so important in a leader of our country? Do you challenge your own thinking by engaging with others, or by taking opportunities to teach when you think there is a teaching moment to be had? Nobody is perfect, and nobody should pretend to be. But I do think that everyone deserves multiple chances to check in with themselves and hold themselves responsible for their own actions. Lucky for me, I spend my day chock-full of teachable moments and have many of them! But I have decided I am not going to waste any more of those opportunities. I am not going to pass up chances to listen, to consider or to engage (and that includes seven year olds to seventy year olds). My older, more reserved self, is going to take the advice of a strapping 21-year-old hopeful that landed herself in Colorado to take this voting opportunity to engage, to teach, to learn, to listen, and to live my values.