It's not as if I can articulate why trying to plan out my lessons makes me anxious. All I know is this: the more I try to plan, the more I feel as though I don't know what I'm doing, what I should be doing, what I need to be doing. I become swamped with feelings of inadequacy. Sure, I can look back at previous years' plans, and that gives me the outline of what I need to be doing now... but it doesn't take the anxiety away.
In fact, it causes a chain reaction of anxiety. I find myself thinking about future lessons I don't particularly want to teach. The more I teach science, for example, the less I like doing it - especially the hands-on activities the kids prefer to the dry, boring, and often confusing book work. Given my own feelings about the science text, you'd think I'd welcome the hands-on "experiments" - but I don't. I find hands-on messy and chaotic, necessitating more time for planning and set-up than is balanced out in benefit of knowledge gained. I hate it.
But here's the thing. Right now, I'm not TEACHING science. I'm in my Social Studies segment of the Thematic Studies lessons. I honestly enjoy teaching Social Studies, inasmuch as I enjoy teaching anything... meaning, it's not quite as painful as many other subjects to me.
And this triggers more thoughts... if this is how I feel about planning and teaching, why am I doing it? BIG anxiety trigger, that is. I know I'd rather be doing something other than teaching, careerwise - I just don't know WHAT. And I also know that most other work out there A) would not pay as much as teaching, and B) would likely require me to do other things I don't like, such as spend all day in a cubicle pushing papers around, jumping to the tune of some petty manager. I never watched The Office, but I've seen enough clips to get the feeling that it wasn't so far off base from reality.
Maybe it's not so much that I don't want to be teaching, but I want to be teaching only what I want to teach, the way I want to teach it, which isn't remotely possible or even within the bounds of reality.
This is what planning time looks like inside my head. It's a mess, and so am I by the time I get the planning done. If I was a drinking woman, I'd need a stiff one. The joy of it is, I can look forward to the same thing all over again in approximately a week. It never ends, nine months out of the year. Even during the summer I find myself dreading the start of the next school year... the start of the planning time. Sigh.
But at least it's done for THIS week.