A Privilege--A Paragraph a Day

Sometimes my job gets stressful--if you've ever experienced teaching high school or read anything about it, you know that this is true.  Stress is part of this world.  But that's not the end of the story.  There with the stress and the hard times is an opportunity to spend a lot of time with a lot of young people, people who have yet to find their own ways in life but who are doing their best to do so.  I have the privilege of getting to know an awful lot of young people who are facing many, many obstacles, but who still keep on keeping on, who still try their best to accomplish what they want to accomplish.  I get to know them as a teacher gets to know them, and sometimes I'm even able to talk to them about things like what they want to get out of life, what they hope to accomplish with their lives, what kinds of hopes and dreams and aspirations they hold in their hearts.  And hopefully, in a very small way that most of them won't even remember, I'll be able to contribute to their abilities to make those dreams come true.  Perhaps I can teach them study skills or writing skills or communication skills; perhaps I won't teach them anything, but I can help to instill confidence in them, and help them to be able to pursue dreams and overcome obstacles.  My work is stressful, but it comes with an incredible privilege--to share a tiny bit of the lives of some of the young people who will still be here on this planet long after I take my leave.  And that's a privilege and responsibility that I hope to live up to.

Who Am I?--A Paragraph a Day

My identity is very important to me--or rather, my identities are very important to me.  I find it fascinating that I have so many of them, depending on the situation.  I have certain core ideals and beliefs and morals that exist across the identities, but the fact is that there's no way that I could ever make an argument that I have a single, consistent identity.  I value telling the truth, but there are situations in which I wouldn't feel that the truth is appropriate.  I'm not a violent person by any means, but I can imagine situations in which violence may be the best course of action,  I'm always going to do my best to maintain the behaviors that I know are helpful and kind and compassionate, but there are days when I'm turned inside and I miss opportunities to show those traits.  I'm pretty easy-going in class with my students, but when someone tries my patience (especially if they do so on purpose), I'm going to act in a different way with them.  I think that sometimes we get down on ourselves because we feel that we've somehow betrayed ourselves when a different trait surfaces, when we're not as kind to someone as we wish we had been, when we say something we wish we hadn't said, when we do something we wish we hadn't done.  While it may be appropriate sometimes to examine such actions firmly, it also is important to remember that the idea of "who we are" could be expanded to include "who we are in a given situation," while keeping in mind that the person we need to be in situation A may not be the person we need to be in situation B.  Life is full of changes and shifts, and a "foolish consistency" isn't going to serve anyone well, least of all ourselves.

Those Little Disasters--A Paragraph a Day

A few days ago, I was walking on our kitchen floor and heard a squishing sound.  That wasn't music to my ears.  It turned out that our dishwasher had been leaking water for some time, and our entire kitchen floor was ruined.  So I've spent the last few days tearing up a wet and moldy floor, scraping glue off a concrete floor, and disposing of a large number of pieces of flooring.  It's not what I wanted to be doing with the last five days, but it is what it is.  And I can't help but think of just how privileged I am to be able to have problems like this, and even to be able to fix them without worrying about what I'm going to eat next week if I spend money fixing it.  I'm also learning a lot about flooring and the floors underneath it and water damage and mold.  I'm getting practice taking off baseboards and putting them back on and fixing things up so that they look really nice.  I'm learning and growing in ways that two weeks ago I had no idea were in my very near future, and all because our dishwasher started leaking and ruined a floor.  I don't know if I can say that I'm actually enjoying the process of fixing the kitchen, but I'm certainly not hating it.

Walk away, of Confront?--A Paragraph a Day

So often we hear how important it is to stand up to anything wrong, to confront people who are doing wrong and tell them how wrong it is.  While I do believe that in certain situations this can be an important way of approaching things, I also know that confrontation isn't always effective and that it can lead to some very negative results.  Sometimes it's better to simply walk away from situations and people, and never go back.  Some people simply aren't willing to change, no matter what we say or do, and our confrontation will surely backfire on us, no matter how good our intentions.  Should I confront this woman for her racist speech, even if I know that my arguments are going to do nothing to change her perspective or her speech?  Because if I do challenge her perspective and beliefs, it's possible that she'll do what ever she can to get back at me, and suddenly my life is much more difficult--and she still has her racist perspective.  I've accomplished nothing in my attempt to get her to see how destructive her views are, and now I'm battling against someone.  How many women have spent years being abused because they keep trying to change their husbands' views and actions, when they could have left those men and started anew with their lives?  Sometimes, people are neither ready nor willing to change their ways, and we hurt ourselves when we spend tons of time beating our heads against brick walls in a futile attempt to change someone who doesn't want to be changed.

I Wasn't Enough--A Paragraph a Day

It interests me sometimes to ponder the past, to think about how I was years ago, decades ago.  In my memory, almost everything I remember is just like yesterday, but it's also a million years ago.  I think of how I was at age five, age twenty, age thirty--usually thrown back in time by a particular song that I hear, or a food that I eat, or a piece of news that I'm reminded of.  One of the commonalities of all the me's that I remember in my early life is that I was constantly cursed with the idea that I wasn't enough, that I didn't measure up to anyone's standards or needs.  I lost out on a lot because of this tendency, especially as far as relationships were concerned.  I thought that people didn't want to be around me, that they found me lacking, that they preferred to be with someone else.  And I believe that in many cases, my feeling became a self-fulfilling prophecy because I was constantly trying to be someone I wasn't, to make people like me, to force something positive to happen with someone else because I didn't trust it to happen without my help.  I no longer do this, and my life is much, much easier and much more pleasant now that I don't.  I'm fine just the way I am, and I no longer feel the need for anyone else's validation--I appreciate it when I get it, but my own happiness doesn't hang in the balance when it comes or it doesn't.  I am enough, just the way I am, and I'm completely willing to accept myself just as I am.  If someone else doesn't see it, that's okay--they're missing out on something they'll never know about, but I'm not going to put myself down or blame myself for their lack of acceptance or caring.  I like life much better this way.

Wind and Fences--A Paragraph a Day

We had a windstorm last night, and a pretty strong one--half of our fence is down out front, and we lost electricity for a couple of hours.  It still remains to be seen how much other damage was done.  It's not a disaster for us, though, as we still have a safe place to live and sleep, and we have food to eat.  It gets me thinking, though, about just how strong this planet is and just how quickly things in our lives can be changed significantly by something as fleeting as a storm that passes through in the matter of a couple of hours.  And isn't that how much of our lives are, too?  That person who's rude to us in the supermarket stays with us for a very long time in our minds, yet is out of our life pretty quickly.  That accident that we had changed everything, even though before it happened it seemed that things were going along quite normally.  Life does change, and our experiences of life change--that's just a rule of life.  While we can't live always dreading the unknown future or thinking about what might happen tomorrow, we do need to be able to deal with change, to accept the fact that the winds and the rains will hit us sometimes, and our main task after they do is to accept the fact that they were here and just go out and fix the fence.  Crying about the broken fence does nothing but add stress to our lives, but fixing it allows us to move on to the other things that are much more important.  So an hour from now, I'll go out and fix it.  It may end up costing more than I expect and it may be a bit more difficult than it looks, but at least I'll be accepting the fact that it needs fixing, and I'll be doing something about that fact.

New Trials--A Paragraph a Day

 I generally hope that things are going to go well in any given situation, but experience tells me that this won't always be the case.  Sometimes, things turn out pretty poorly, and when they do, it's up to us to make the most out of a poor situation, so to speak.  I'm in that situation now, for example--I was hired at the school I'm at to teach Spanish, an area of expertise in which I have a lot of experience and training, and in which I'm quite competent.  We also have very good resources available to us for teaching Spanish, so I have plenty of materials for class.  Unfortunately, though, it turns out that I'm teaching only one Spanish class and three other courses that I've never taught before, and for which I have no resources at all.  In other words, I'm preparing every class from scratch, trying to scrape together materials and make a semester work for the students.  This is an incredibly stressful and time-consuming situation, to say the least.  So what do I have to do?  I have to do the job, of course, or leave the school--which would leave a whole lot of students without a teacher.  And when I do the job, I have to try to keep focused on the positive when I can find it.  I have to try to remember always that what I do, I do for the students, not for the administrators who have put me into this awful situation.  I have to try to find ways to make myself look forward to going to school rather than dreading it, and to look forward to preparing classes rather than hating the process.  If I don't make this shift in perspective, I'm in for a miserable semester, and who wants that?  How things turn out over the next few months really is up to me, and I'm not the only one affected--my students, also, will know if I'm miserable or if I'm enjoying the work that I'm doing.  And they don't deserve to have me at my worst as a teacher.