I am also back to teaching. I did not do the pencil-shuffling-school-supply-organization this year. Kind of surprising. I didn't obsess about certain things in my classroom. Instead I lovingly put certain things back in their rightful place. And I didn't do tons of back-to-school shopping for teacher clothes either. I bought jewelry and shoes, and wondered when I had become that person. In this way, the transition was seamless. I have teacher clothes that work for a while. And the pencils were already in the desk drawer where I left them in June. And now the lessons I am using just need fine tuning.More new people are in my life, and for the next two years will be my students. I am getting to know them, which is a process that takes time and lots of reassurance and kindness and also some iron will too. And the 8th graders I already know are not exempt from this. That iron will is of a different sort. I say the 'Pert Age' always pushes a line of some sort, September or otherwise. Both when I am old to them, or still new. They are always checking to see if I will call them out. It is the challenge I like and can do, but in September it makes you tired.
Overall, there is a calm in my life as a teacher though that I have never felt before. Not to this level. And I think it's called getting older and getting better. I am still making lots of mistakes, but they are of a different kind. And I laugh at myself more. This year I forgot the name of not only a parent, but a student I had just had for two years, and also his younger brother. (What a welcome.) I always thought it was lame when teachers said they sometimes misplaced a name. How could that happen? But this year it did. And I was mortified and expressed this properly later, and of course she was gracious to me. She always is. Which also teaches me about a lot of other things.
Last week a kid came to me with his homework in a Ziploc baggie. It had been chewed up by his dog. You always think this is a joke, but it's not. I think it happens when your dog wants to play when you're doing your homework on the floor. But that is just my guess. I thought it was an apt representation of the stereotype.
Also this week....I talked to an old student in the hallway, a senior this year, who suddenly wanted to reminisce about a trick they played on me the first year I was a teacher. This was the class I reckoned with, and now they are seniors, and all of that seems like a long time ago. He asked me if I remembered what they did. (Um, yes, completely.) And then he said, 'Whew. I'll tell you now, that's the day I realized you had wrath.'
I want to be cryptic, since this is something said online. But I will just say this was not your regular 'put a snake in the drawer of your country schoolteacher' joke. And it required wrath from a few people. And I didn't scream and yell. It was more of the white hot rage burning inside that propelled me to say very little until I could and do very calculated things instead.
So I laughed in the hall and agreed with him, but later thought about how right he was to use a word like that one. And...reckoning moments in the first year of teaching.
Beyond school, there are lots of good things happening right now in life. There is also a lot of chronic stress and tears that follow behind uncertainty, and reckoning going on with God. I have been reminded often this week about the quote by C.S. Lewis that says that God whispers to us in our pleasures and shouts to us in our pain. So I am hearing God in the form of a loud and reassuring voice this week. In the look of fall, in the Bible, in the words of good friends who live by me and pray, in structure and distraction and time to stay quiet and think a little too.
All in all, I still think that this is ever present, and ever good....
"When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. And when life is bitter, say thank you and grow."
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