Distance (Learning) Makes the Heart Grow Fonder?

It's been two weeks since my anxiety started about Covid-19.  Things are not going well Out There... stores are shut, for the most part, as are restaurants.  There's no place to go and nothing to do once you get there.  It reminds me a lot of Sundays when I was little, when all the stores were closed... too quiet, too still.  You are able to go to the grocery store or to other stores that sell necessities, like WalMart, but with everyone online and in the real world screaming at you to stay the heck home, you feel guilty - and scared - to go there.

Schools are closed, but that doesn't mean we teachers are out of work.  After a short break, we were all informed that we're now doing Distance Learning... teaching via computer.  That instigated a bit of a panic among my colleagues and myself, let me tell you!  HOW are we supposed to teach on a computer????  WHAT are we supposed to use to deliver our lessons????  HOW THE HECK DO YOU USE THESE PROGRAMS WE'VE NEVER BEFORE HEARD OF?????

But, as with many things, that panic eased as we gamely threw ourselves into the breach and started trying to figure out how to do what we were supposed to be doing.  I learned how to Zoom a meeting.  I learned how to Screencastify my lessons, making videos that my students could watch.  I figured out how to effectively navigate Google Classroom - though I have not yet figured out what on EARTH the use of the "stream" is.  Seriously, Google people... get rid of that.  It's bloody useless.

And... much to my own shock... I'm finding that I'm actually enjoying teaching again, for the first time in I don't know how long.  Why?  Darned if I know.  It's definitely not the lack of kids... I really, truly enjoy my students, being with them, giving them their daily dose of knowledge.  I'm not one of those wonderful teachers who is miserably lonely without them, mind you.  But I do enjoy being with them, when I am.

It might be that classroom management is much, much easier.  I'm definitely happier that I don't need to spend so very much of my time hushing one student, telling another to stop eating paper, telling a third to open up to the right page, and then telling that first student to hush again.  I am able to interact, in text, with each and every kid who posts an assignment.  I'm able to answer questions as they come up, and encourage students as they go along.  I'm not expected to pull small groups for instruction while at the same time monitoring the rest of the class, trying to assure that everyone is dutifully engaged in some sort of learning activity - small groups, honestly, are the bane of my teaching existence.  And I don't worry about having an administrator show up unannounced, or having a lesson interrupted by a call from the office, or telling that kid who won't stop yakking to SHUT UP ALREADY (which I can't, but wish I could).

I'm actually working much harder putting together my lessons than I have for many, many years - but it isn't wearing on me the way it usually does.  In fact, I can go for several hours at a clip not really being aware of how much work I'm actually doing.  I'm collaborating with colleagues the way we should ALWAYS be doing, because every one of us is in the same boat that we're building even as we're sailing it.  And as a result, I feel a good deal fonder of my colleagues than I usually do.

I'm not thrilled with the amount of time I'm sitting down.  My body is really feeling that, and I'm not getting out and walking around as much as I know I should.  But... I'm happier than I thought I possibly could be, two weeks ago.  I'm still anxious, yes, but it's not the all-pervasive anxiety that consumed me at the start of this pandemic.  Maybe it's having something productive to do each day - something that vitally needs doing.  Having a task to do is a great way to alleviate anxiety.

All in all, I'd say that thus far, the social distancing and isolation hasn't hit me as hard as I'd been afraid it would.  I hope it stays that way.

Anxiety Trigger: Lesson Planning

I don't know why planning my lessons is an anxiety trigger.  I don't even know if I'm alone in this, or if it's common among other teachers.  All I know is this: sitting down alone to plan my lessons is one of my least favorite times of the week.

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.

Not Feeling the Love

I'm not feeling the love for teaching at the moment.

Teaching is what I do to support my family and to support my writing.  There was a time I considered it my calling - a time when I was on fire for teaching, wanted to teach, wanted it more than almost anything other than becoming a published writer.  But that's not where I am in my heart right now.

I still want to teach.  Why?  Well, writing is a funny way to make a living, and precious few people CAN make a living at writing.  Hence, a second job is necessary, and teaching is better than the alternative... a soulless office job, pushing papers around for some company nobody's ever heard of, jumping to some manager's every whim.  Besides, if I have to work around people who act like children, as too many adults I've encountered do, I'm darn well going to work around actual children.  At least they're acting their age.

But that's a far cry from having a fire in my belly for teaching, as I once did. 

It makes me very, very sad to know that I don't love teaching right now.  I don't want to become one of those awful deadwood teachers, marking time until retirement, taking up space, burned out long ago and refusing to leave.  I truly don't.  But I'm not sure how to rekindle my fire when I've lost my spark.

Just a TADD ADD...

I'm thinking about starting a blog dedicated to learning how to manage as a teacher with ADD.  It's something I both want to do (there is pretty much NO information out there for teachers who HAVE the condition, as opposed to teachers who have children with ADD in their classrooms) but also don't want to do (because heaven only knows I have enough on my plate as it is).

The alternative, of course, would be to adjust this blog to make it include my ADD learning curve.  I haven't been good about keeping this blog up... so I suppose it's a possibility.  TADD means, to me, Teacher with ADD.

And if you don't know what ADD is... lucky you!

Factoid: People with ADD often have trouble making decisions not because they can't focus on any one thing... but because they focus on TOO MANY THINGS all at once!

Ode to Joy - Beaker Style!

I had an utterly horrendous day at work yesterday, and today was saved from being much the same by two facts:

1. I took a "mental health" day.  It does NOT do to have a complete nervous breakdown in front of one's students. 
2. I found this clip on YouTube while looking up Victor Borge's phonetic punctuation sketch for tomorrow's mini lesson on types of sentences.  "Ode to Joy" is one of my favorite classical pieces... and the Muppets are one of my favorite joy-bringers.  And so, I share this, hoping it will bring joy to someone else as well.

Here's the Victor Borge clip I was looking for...

And this is just too cute, and must be viewed after watching the Victor Borge original.

- CV

Lessons, Novels, and Life - When Planning Goes Wrong

I'm a fairly good teacher.  I am not, nor will I ever be, Teacher of the Year material... I don't think I even WANT to be that.  I know I am a writer first, a teacher second.  But one thing teaching, writing, and being a wife and mom have in common is my bete noir... planning.

I am not a good planner.  When, once upon a time, a professor made all us teachers-in-training take a learning styles inventory that classified us as concrete or abstract, sequential or random... well, I was one of two people who turned up as abstract sequential.  The professor didn't know what the hell to make of us - his words, not mine - but my colleague and I looked at each other, raised our eyebrows, and then told him, "Give us specific instructions for what you want, then get the heck out of our way."*

When it comes to my lessons, I am easily overwhelmed looking at the big picture.  Without a published curriculum for my writing classes, I struggle to follow the lead of my teammates, who all seem to understand perfectly well what they are doing all the time.  I yearn to teach a curriculum that has a textbook, through which I can proceed in order, supplementing and diverting as my students' needs dictate.  As it stands, I need to teach grammar, composition, editing, and revising without a textbook, without a scope and sequence, and without concise resources I can print off or photocopy easily.  There's a wide range of books out there - but I simply don't have time to read them all.

When it comes to my novel, I have an internal compass.  I don't need to plan things out on paper - I know where things should go, and when I try to set things down in writing (often to try to show my students How It's Done), I get frustrated beyond belief.  Happily, so long as I can carve out time to write, I can generally make the most of what's in my head and the draft becomes the long-term plan.  I guess this is what happens when you're able to follow your heart - you Just Know, and planning - if it's done at all - is done for your own clarification, not as a necessary precursor to the actual heart's work.

And my life.  Oh, god, my life.  I need a plan.  I need to get a schedule going, as I know that I'm not spending anywhere near enough time with my husband and son as I should be, as I want to be, but with the myriad of other things tugging at me - and refusing to give up my writing - it's becoming a morass.  But planning requires time, and to find the time, I need to plan for it...

I. HATE. PLANNING!!!!!  I wish it wasn't so bloody necessary to success!

Strange Way to Make a Living...

Writing is a strange way to make a living, and I had sold many books by the time I was forty but was not making enough money to live on.  I worked construction, ran heavy equipment, tracked satellites, taught - did many things to support life - and by the time I was forty I was working very hard and had become almost completely broke, living with my wife and son in a small cabin in northern Minnesota with no plumbing, no electricity, and no real prospects.      
                                                                            - Gary Paulsen, Woodsong

I read that quotation aloud to my sixth grade students the other day, when one of them asked me if I would quit teaching once I got rich and famous as a writer, and I laughed.  They were astounded that Gary Paulsen - himself probably one of the most famous writers they know at their young age - would write such a thing.  They seemed equally perplexed that a teacher who is a published writer had such a pessimistic view of her chances of becoming wealthy doing what she loves.  Many of my students come from families who pull, if not six figure incomes, at least in the high fives.  They cannot conceive - though this is partially an aspect of simply being twelve - of not actually achieving one's dream career, however lofty it is.  They've been raised to believe that as long as they dream it, they can do it.

I wish I still held that lie as convicted truth.

I am a writer who teaches.  I love being with my students, but as each successive year wears on, I hate with greater passion what teaching has become.  I don't like to talk about it.  I don't have the statistics readily available in my head, can't counter the arguments of the other side, don't really have a better solution.  But where I once felt that teaching was my Calling, one that could live happily beside my heart's dream of writing, I now see it as the lesser of evils.  I can teach, or I can work at Wal Mart or some dead-spirit business office job, or I can force my family to do without health insurance and the income my teaching provides.  I can't support my family on my writing.  Not yet.  Maybe not ever.

Writing IS a strange way to make a living.  You either carve time out for it, or you feel yourself begin to wither a bit inside.  You know that you MUST do other things, as Gary Paulsen writes, "to support life" - but you know, unless you're a rare creature indeed, that these "other things" are not what you REALLY want to do, and every moment you're attending to the needs of what brings in the money is one less minute that you're writing.

Then, too, is the issue that writing is not something that one can schedule.  If you're in a creative mood and in the middle of something else, you either drop that "something else" and scribble like mad for a bit - or you lose that spark, which will never again burn as brightly or as clearly as when the Idea first struck you.  I've taken to spending a good chunk of my teaching "downtime" - meaning, my lunch - writing.  I no longer visit with my peers, and sometimes, when they come visit me, I find myself vaguely irritated - something I instantly quash, as having peers who care and want to spend time with me is as necessary as writing is to keeping my sanity.  But I need that time to write, because otherwise, I'm wandering through the day half a person, my creative spark snuffed.

I hate that I can't make a living by writing.  I dream, even now, of being "discovered" - some editor of a publishing house, some agent, maybe just some writer at a comics publisher, will see a fragment of my work and will Know.  It's replaced my dream of being carried off by a white knight or a black-clad ninja, romantically whisked away from the mundane and onorous into a world of magic and Happily Ever Afters.  But it's not going to happen... not without a ton of work on my part.  Luckily for me, it's work I'm happy to do.

And while I work at being a writer... I really am grateful that I have paying work to support myself and my family.  I may hate teaching as a profession most days... but I truly enjoy being a teacher.  A teacher who writes... and a writer who teaches.