Teacher Heaven

Teaching is exhausting and overwhelming and frustrating. I never appreciated how much before.  Most mornings that I begin with energy and hopefulness end with me walking home with my head buzzing and spirit dragging.

I know what I want to achieve, but I haven’t figured out how to do it well yet. It’s going to take time for my daily practice to match up with what I hope is possible as a teacher. I still haven’t figured out routines and procedures, and I want to throw out the class rules and anything else I began with and start over already.  It’s hard to have patience with myself, because I want to be a master at it immediately, not months and years down the road.

Yesterday, I tried having my fourth-graders write poetry using a poetry prompt from Joseph Fasano’s book “The Magic Words.”  It was kind of a huge chaotic mess, and it took way too long, and I was thinking maybe I should wait until later in the year to try poetry again. I felt that the whole attempt was kind of a fail.

But today, when I asked them to get their writing notebooks out, one of my students whispered to me, “I love this notebook because of what I wrote in it.” And then he patted his poem lovingly.  

That is a little glow of joy that I don’t want to lose in the heap of struggle that was today.

❤️ GlowWorm