My
husband and I spent the day at Grinnell College, where we met up with two of
our children to watch a third play football on the loveliest day of the year.
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| Harrison and Palmer, two of my six. |
| Other than checking my email by phone, and flipping through this week's New Yorker for possible articles to share with my seniors this week, I did nothing school-related all day. |
But tomorrow I will put in 8-10 hours of reading and responding, planning and posting. By week's end my mental white-board is unreadable: scribbles and cross-outs, revisions, excisions, addenda, amendments.
I use weekends to clean my slate in order to start fresh on Mondays. I've learned this the hard way. If I don't catch up on Sundays, I will chase myself in circles all week. I know teachers who do not have my workload. If I look out the wrong window, I can really resent this. If I look out the right window, I remember that teaching students to write and think is noble work, and I genuinely love what I do. But to do it at a level I'm proud of, I have to do the time. If I don't catch up on responding to my students' work, I will spiral into a very bad place. Yes, I've been there.
I have, over the years, developed strategies to manage the workload and still respond to my students' work meaningfully and promptly. But that means working weekends. 'Nuff said.
Day 27: What role do weekends and holidays play in your teaching?
Reflection: It has taken me a number of years to reconcile myself to the amount of time outside the school day teaching English requires of me. I say "of me" because I understand I need more time than many teachers do. I'm not a fast reader/responder. I'm not naturally organized. I'm easily distracted. But I've come to realize how I feel when I prep well for the week vs. how I feel when I don't, and I've learned that I am much happier with my teaching and myself when I invest (weekend) time to align the "me I am" more closely to the "me I want to be."
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