Has Teaching Lost Its Magic?

Happy New Year! I hope you (all 5-6 readers–LOL) had a good Christmas and are enjoying your break from the routine. It’s flying by way too fast, isn’t it? Even so, I hope you are enjoying family or friends and unplugging just a bit. Personally, I’ve welcomed this time to catch up on my personal interests while completely ignoring my job responsibilities. What a blessing, too, that I have been getting more sleep and moving at a leisurely pace for once. I love being able to run out to coffee with a pal, attend some mellow parties, catch a matinee, and spend time with my son and his wife before he gets shipped out with the Navy this spring. (That’s going to be another opportunity for personal growth, to be sure.)

The rest of this post will contain some insights , as well as nuggets of extreme transparency which may surprise some of you. Emotion alert! Stop reading now if that annoys you. It’s not like you haven’t heard me rant before…


I’ve had some aha! moments this Christmas as I’ve tried to figure out why I was so burnt out, negative, and cranky during the 2nd quarter. It’s very unlike me to dread my job and dislike the kids. Several days I woke up thinking that if I had to battle the behavior problems and technology roadblocks one more day I’d have to quit my particular job and/or teaching altogether. This has rarely happened to me in the past 13 years of teaching. I’ve got 15 years or so left before retirement and I sometimes wonder if I can make it that far at this grueling pace (60+ hours a week); even when I’m enjoying the job and the kids this takes its toll. So I’ve been soul-searching for the reasons I’ve been so discontent, physically spent,and spiritually adrift.

Part of my malaise the past couple of months is that we are teaching an extra hour every day–exhausting! I hope it will be worth it when we get out on May 1 (so they can remodel our building all summer). I can see light at the end of this tunnel … four months to go. Next year should be more “normal.”

Also very notable, I’ve let my fitness regime slide into nowhere so I’m feeling fatigued and lumpy rather than strong and energetic as I did when I was working out almost daily. Plus doing a lot of cycling. Now I haven’t been on the mountain or road bike for about 2 months. Even the Cycling Club at my school has quit riding for the winter and only meets about club business. We discount the impact physical movement or lack thereof plays in our workaholic lives, especially those of us who spend a great deal of time at the computer and on our mobile devices. No wonder my back hurts, I’m exhausted, and my weight is slowly inching upward. Duh. I do miss the ability to get outside and I regret having to get up at 4:30 am to fit in workouts. Occupational hazard, I’m afraid. I hope I can be more disciplined about that and focus on the benefits I’ll reap rather than whining about the cold weather keeping me indoors…or the fact that we go to work in the dark and leave in the dark…or my fatigue in the evenings…blah, blah, blah. My workouts being sporadic certainly played a part in lowering my quality of life. Why not make the gym a non-negotiable item on the calendar again? Workaholism never makes me a better person.

Finally, I’m thinking that a huge part of the terrible morale and lingering sadness in my school community was that some of our former students, one of whom still has a sister attending here, were involved in a fatal multiple murder-suicide shooting in early November. Right here in our own little town! Unspeakable. Sad. Painful. I was alone and lonesome already at a conference several states away when this happened. Somehow experiencing it all via internet news, social networks, email, and phone calls was especially disconcerting. I wrote about this briefly in the past.

So I think we were all out of sorts, worried and a little depressed after that–kids and grownups alike. We are still reliving the trauma every time we hold fundraisers for the survivor, candlelight vigils, etc. When the news stations actually played the 911 call on air it just stirred everything up again. Horrific and unnecessary!

I’ve determined that somewhere in all the uproar I must have decided I wasn’t going to love my students so much — losing a couple of them hurt more than I’d like to admit — but I was unaware of this ill-conceived choice I’d made. I was surprised at the depth of my sorrow for these kids since I haven’t done a good job of keeping up with them when they moved on to high school. It’s not like I’m some kind of saintly, generous mentor to them once they leave my buildings. God knows I’m too selfish for that most of the time. But I discovered that each of the kids have a little special place in my heart, including the ones who were shot. Therefore I must grieve like everyone else and yet move on without worrying about the future.

So I’m starting to believe the reason I couldn’t appreciate my present students as much as usual was that I was pushing them away and protecting myself. (Who’s supposed to be the grownup here?) This was all unconscious until about a week ago. Perhaps it is strange to others but it’s starting to make sense to me. I resolve to not recoil from (appropriate) relationships with my students. If we didn’t care for children we couldn’t do this job! This semester I want to make my classroom a place of solace and acceptance, not a cold lab characterized by my bristly reserve or unrealistic demands. And furthermore, I want to be uplifting to my friends, family, and colleagues, not disgruntled, complaining, and gossipy.

So what does that have to do with the rest of the edublogosphere? Nothing, except that I want to apologize if my negativity, exhaustion and lethargy spilled into my comments, tweets, and blog posts this past fall. Maybe you can understand my reasons, however superficial they may seem.

I was overwhelmed. I was feeling incompetent, discouraged and too numb to fight the good fight regarding professional or personal growth. I’ve tried so many things to stretch and challenge myself career-wise in the past couple of years and none of them have blossomed into new or long-term opportunities. I was very frustrated. I am tired of turning somersaults, negotiating, asking special permission, and generally beating my head against a wall trying to bring my practice into the 21st Century within the very restrictive confines of the seriously Learning 1.0 environment I teach in. Many of you are quite familiar with that struggle and have remained positive or steadfast anyway. You are my heroes, inspirations, and role models! Thank you!

Now that I am a little refreshed, refueled and restored I look forward to a new year with more optimism. I’ve signed up for some tech classes, gathered up my evidence for renewing my state license, I’m working on getting an increment raise, and I’m committed to learning some conversational Italian with a friend who has graciously agreed to travel to Italy with me some time in 2008 or 2009. I’m committed to having a life outside of work and the web so I can remain enthusiastic about this profession. Wish me luck!

Before too much time gets away from me and I get caught up in a new semester’s worth of joys, concerns and administrative tasks, I will try to follow this post with some reflections on other things I tried in my classroom last fall.

All the best to you and your family in 2008!