The Holiday Dilhemma

It's the last Thursday of the holidays - and its 9:37am. I have stopped what I was doing as a sudden thought has come across my mind that I felt needed me to stop and reflect on. (I was sorting through one of the piles of disorganization doom that I created last term - think 25cm of miscellaneous white paper - I will return to it shortly.)

Holidays are interesting in the teaching world. Based on one of my last posts where I borrowed the words of another to suggest that 'there is never enough' - I find that I lump my holidays with expectations that I will complete an INSANE amount of catch-up work, in the futile hope that I will achieve that unattainable perfection that I have in fact done enough. So now that I find myself at this point in my holidays (i.e staring down the tunnel of a new term and feeling relatively unprepared) I wonder what would constitute a successful holiday. What would I have done over the last two weeks to achieve the very tricky balance of feeling rested and physically ready for another term, but also mentally organised and prepared for another ten weeks of classes, meetings, extra curricular rehearsals, marking, and smiling.

I firstly am going to give myself a bit of a break. As a first year teacher, doing programme planning for three senior classes, the notion of feeling fully planned and prepared is an enigma to me at the moment. I try really hard to get my head around the nature of assessment, what the student needs to demonstrate in order to be successful in this assessment, and how this would look in my classroom planning and delivery - but the truth of the matter is, that I think this is impossible to predict sometimes. So many times this year already, I have felt really prepared for a class - then despaired when each activity I had prepared felt unsuccessful or just didn't float in some way or another. The only way to feel in control of this is to have the experience of having done this before, reflected, done it again, and again and again - and then even still there is an element of uncertainty.

So back to where I started - what justifies successful holidays. I think mainly that I give myself a rest. A rest from the thinking, worrying, strategising, fretting and basically 'freaking out' about school. At this point on the tenth day of my holidays I feel that I have given myself that chance, and therefore I feel ready to start term three. Sure, I could have done more, but I needed the break. I head into future terms and subsequent sets of holidays knowing that there will always be a careful balance and that I should not beat myself up about tipping the scales sometimes.

Make safe choices...

Annoyingly, I already started this blog on my tablet 'Blogger' app - and for some reason it did not save. #Firstworldproblems. However - for those bloggers out there, you will know that it is quite difficult to pick up where you left off or even recreate a feeling that you were blogging about - so instead I start afresh.

If I stop to consider what this blog is really about I think it is about forming relationships with students. I find this a really interesting concept. At college we read a myriad of things that told us HOW to form lasting and meaningful learning relationships with our students (didn't we?!?!). Whether I read it somewhere, or just formed a misguided opinion, I came to this job thinking that forming relationships was just a series of steps that I needed to undertake in order to complete this seemingly simple task. One that I also arrogantly assumed I would be awesome at!

How wrong was I?

First of all...teenagers are busy, fickle, obsessed, passionate creatures. It is highly likely that you will be loved one day and hated the next. I can honestly say that many times over the last two terms I have done the broken the golden rule and taken those moods personally. One particularly memorable moment was when I had more than one student in a junior class act in a disrespectful and defiant manner and when I exercised every ounce of classroom management that I thought I had they just explained to me that the reason they weren't doing the work was because  "No offence Miss, but its so boring" and then the real killer "Everybody thinks so". This morning I was reading some of the early pages of Gretchen Rubin's "The Happiness Project" - where she astutely outlines her "Secrets of Adulthood" as "the lessons [she'd] learnt with some difficulty as [she'd] grown up. One of which, she reveals is, "Never start a sentence with the words 'no offence'. Oh how I wish my little juniors could take the fast track with that particular lesson. (Of course I did take offence and spent the first ten minutes of the senior class that followed trying to stop the flow of tears in my office)

What have I learnt from this - well, one thing is that the maturity of the student does influence their ability to behave. I have been struggling to come to terms with the fact that the juniors of the school are the worst behaved but perhaps this is because they might missed the memo on how to be respectful, hopefully through a lack of defiance and an attempt at the task given, a concept that we expect these fearful juniors to arrive at college with. If they have missed this, as a result of poor upbringing, or lack of interest in them, then we might need to wait until they get to the maturity of realizing that their decisions and actions, ultimately affect themselves (this is also a hopeful outcome, as many, sadly, might not get there). What happened to my little juniors who explained to me that the work was boring? By the end of the second term they had both being removed from all of their classes for repeat offending.

I did not make lasting relationships with these students. Perhaps I will have another opportunity in the future. However, the main intention of this post was to celebrate the lasting relationships that I have made.  I am considering as I prepare to go back to the third term, what relationships are the strongest. These relationships are this way because of certain approaches:

• being consistent (something that I am not particularly good at, but moments of consistency do yield lasting results) 
• learning to laugh at myself (something that students get a huge kick out of)  
• having a high expectation of their work output, or more simply, expressing faith in them
• and - taking an interest in them as individuals

I feel it is well past the time that I should sign off. My head is swarming with other anecdotes that I could add here, so I feel that this topic might have another post in the future. However I sign off now as I started. When I was on placement last year, one of the teachers I was assigned to always finished her week with "make safe choices" - this stuck with me and I found myself incorporating it into my own classroom sign-off. To keep it light I would always add to it "Make safe choices and eat your vegetables". I was convinced that everyone thought I was a little nutty until one day when I was distracted, hadn't finished the lesson with any sort of grace and kids were sprinting out the door to their next class one instructed me to "have a safe weekend Miss, eat your vegetables" - and at that point I realised that I was making a little impact :-)  

There is never enough....

I really like this article that popped up on Facebook the other day.... "The hard part - a comment about teaching". It gave me some comfort about some of the things that I experience through this new career of mine. It writes of the American experience of being a teacher - but I still think that it has valuable things to say. What I consider most valuable about this however, is not the message it gives to everyone else about 'how difficult it is to be a teacher' (as we all know we will just enter into one of those pointless "but you get all those holidays debates" and that is something that I consider beside the point at the moment), but the message it gives to teacher.

For me, at a shiny 20 weeks into this career, it says to me "Hey, don't sweat it!" - and this is advice that I find really helpful. For the last two terms my main source of angst has being "I haven't done this yet..." Or, to expand...

• I haven't written that resource booklet for any of my senior classes (at no point did I actually need to do this, I just decided that it was what I should be doing to enable my students to learn the most out of this unit) 
• I did not finish writing that unit plan so it was at a hand-inable standard 
• When I chose that play to do with my senior classes, I did not read 3 others to make sure it was the right choice
• I haven't finished the junior marking
• I haven't finished the senior marking
• I haven't tidied my inbox
• I haven't tidied my desk! 
• I haven't reflected enough
• I haven't baked for cake club yet
• I haven't...I haven't....I HAVEN'T

I allow this thought process to usually, completely take over. I feel like I constantly allow myself to live in the red and it is really tough place to try and function. I mentioned in an earlier post that I find self belief really hard to generate - but I can see now, that being in the 'I haven't place' only constantly puts myself in the mind set that I haven't and therefore I obviously cant.  I find the motto of the aforementioned article rather comforting as it puts quite plainly - there is never enough. So, the message I take from that is, stop trying to DO everything. And also, accept that sometimes you will feel a little thinly spread, but you are also in a profession with a great amount colleagues who will understand and support you. I have one major goal as I head into the second half of the year - to simplify and streamline. I want to develop strategies to work smart, to not get tied up with superfluous tasks, and to get the best classroom environment I can. So the first thing I did - I quit cake club. (Will also help the tight jeans issue - but will save that for another post).