Grateful Friday

School the week before Christmas is not for the faint of heart.  The children are keyed up.  I have not helped the situation because I love Christmas and have been adding to the mayhem.  We could do some quiet bland worksheets and calm everyone down.  But no, let's read another Christmas story, I say.

Yesterday was Ugly Sweater Day a.k.a. the day none of us run errands after school. I love my third grade team! 

I'm grateful at the close of the 2020 year for the place where I work.  That place is all heart.  The teachers were recently sent an email to stop donating coats because they were running out of room to store them.  A kindergarten teacher is also a Young Women leader and for "Girls Camp" in pandemic times, they had a food drive and donated all the food to the school.  When the school hears about a family in trouble, food is loaded up and delivered.  There was a giving tree where we bought gifts for needy students.  

We can't do much to lift the burdens on these narrow shoulders but I'm so grateful to be at a place where everyone does what they can.  The errand of angels is given to women.  They inspire me to be better.

When I was in high school, I had two teachers tell me, when they found out what my career plans were, that I was "too smart" to be a teacher and I should choose something else.

Even at the time I recognized it was an awful thing to say to someone.  (Also, they were teachers....)

Here's the thing.

I'm not too smart to be a teacher.  If anything I'm not smart enough.

It takes all my brain power to manage all the personalities, to differentiate learning, to pantomime to non English speakers, to keep them engaged, to keep their masks on, to switch gears when a lesson isn't working, to motivate the daydreamers and recalcitrant defeated ones who don't want to try, to address learning disabilities and how to work around them, to plan lessons and keep track of all the things.  

Keeping track of all the things could be a job unto itself.

Then I have to be able to use technology.  I'm tech support for my students and they push random buttons that do random things to their Chromebooks.

(I've been known to text Adam for advice.)

I have to be flexible to all the crazy things that happen (the bloody noses and broken shoes and spilled contents of desks and/or water bottles.)  I need to wade through the tattling after recess and decide which things need to be ignored and which need to be dealt with.  I have to notice the students who don't have warm enough coats and who are hungry.  I have to not cry when they show up in clothes so dirty you can only imagine the chaos they live in, when one of them is heartbroken over a death in their family or they tell me that their family doesn't have enough money for Christmas this year.  (I have to not cry in front of them; I cry plenty when they aren't around.)

I'm not too smart for this.  Not by a long shot.

I'm grateful no one has noticed and I get to keep trying.