Thankfulness & hope

It's Wednesday evening.  The first day of school this week after the freezing temps gave us two days off.  I'm inside keeping warm, waiting for my husband to get home, and feeling so thankful.  I can usually list off a pretty long list of things that I am thankful for, but the sad thing is that I don't always FEEL thankful for them.  I can acknowledge that they are good things in my life that I KNOW I am thankful for, yet sometimes I'm just not feeling grateful.

Today I am very grateful.  I very much enjoyed having two extra days off this week.  Generally, during the school year, I feel like I can never catch up on sleep.  I wake up so early every day that usually on the weekends I can't sleep in long enough to feel like it has helped.  But this weekend I slept in.  Yesterday I slept until 10, and it was glorious.

I am also thankful for my husband.   He is just so wonderful and loving, and we got to spend a lot of quality time together this weekend.  I appreciate him for working hard the past two days, when I escaped work because of the cold.  I love learning about his job and how things work in a big business.  I never thought of going into business myself, and I still don't think it would be suited to my gifts and personality, but I like knowing how business works (to an extent), especially now that I've built up a background knowledge to understand what he's talking about.  :-)  I also love that he has such a gift of offering words of encouragement.

I am thankful for the changes that are happening in my department at school.  And I'm thankful that I'm thankful.  Because for most of the curriculum development process I have felt pessimistic and certain that no real changes would actually occur.  We might develop these complicated curriculum maps and choose a new textbook, but who would actually dare to try to run their lessons differently?  It seemed like a hopeless cause to me until I realized that with the new changes coming, I had the opportunity to experiment in my classroom.  I will dare to try new methods.  Let me back up.

About a month ago, I read a book called "Let Your Life Speak" by Parker J. Palmer.  A friend and mentor had given me the book quite a number of months before, and I had started it but not gotten very far.  Then as Christmas break started coming to a close I started feeling it again; the dread of "What next?"  It is something that has become normal for me over the past few years.  I start wondering what will happen when the school year ends.  "Should I keep teaching? What else would I do?  Where are we going to live?  Should I go back to grad school?  Is this really what I want to do?  If I stay in teaching is it because I'm too scared to leave?  If I leave teaching, how do I know what to pursue?"  The questions aren't always the same, but for some reason they always seem to come in late winter into the spring.  Last year I had the stress of planning the wedding.  This year I was just so uneasy about having to make career decisions.  So in my anxiety I picked up this book that had been gifted to me last year and I found it so encouraging.  It was about finding your vocation.

This book made me think a lot and journal.  Journaling is something that I know I should do regularly because it helps me keep perspective and relieve me of thoughts that build in my mind and stress me out.  Palmer talks about his journey to finding his vocation.  He talks about decisions he made and how upon reflecting later, he realized that the reasons he had believed he made his decisions for, were not really the true reasons.  For example, he thought he might become a University president and it seemed like many people thought that's what he should be, but he left Stanford claiming that the academic environment was too pretentious.  In his later reflections he concluded that he had really left because he was afraid of failing in the academic sphere, but it was really a step that was necessary in his journey even if he didn't realize the true reason at the time.  He later discovered that it was the right decision for him because his gifts would not have allowed him to flourish in the institutional setting.

One point that he made that I really like was that sometimes a door closing is more telling that a door opening.  As we go through life, we sometimes wish we had just one open door to walk through, to avoid all the hassle of tough decision-making (or at least I certainly do).  However, his point is that often, we need to pay attention to the doors that close to inform us about ourselves, our skills, our limitations, and our next steps.  Palmer also emphasizes the importance of listening to yourself.  This is something that I struggle with because I tend to look at other people's strengths and wish they were my own, rather than truly listening to myself and understanding and accepting who I am.  I often wish I could just be skilled at everything and have no limitations.  That is the perfectionism in me.  It is something I always struggle with and probably always will.  But I think reading books like this is an important reminder to me to accept my limitations and to let go of this idea that if I work hard enough I can overcome all of my limitations and be skilled at everything.  I think hard work goes a long way to making changes, but no matter what there are skills that are simply more natural in us.  Every human is created differently on purpose and it doesn't help for me to decide think that I should be able to do this, or I should think like that.  I am who I am.  I am who God created me to be.  Palmer mentions how we are created in God's image and God says "I am who I am."  Are we then supposed to fight our natures?

In another part of his book, Palmer talked about fears that hold us back from taking steps on our journey.  That was a pretty interesting part for me to read because I felt that I had struggled with each of the 5 fears he listed at some point.  They are the types of fears that paralyze you, and the type of fear that I had been feeling.  Ever since I started teaching I have been afraid that I am not good enough, that I am not suited to teaching, etc.  And I realized, too, that I was blaming a lot of my frustration with school on systems that could not be changed.  I complained a lot about the way things were taught and my curriculum and feeling stuck teaching in ways that I felt were unrewarding for the students and myself.  I complained and I was convinced that there was nothing I could do to change it.  Yet, I started thinking, "What if there are some things I can do, but I'm just too scared to even try?  And I would rather hide behind these systems so that I don't have to try?  What if part of my frustration is really coming from within myself because I am denying my nature (in other words, I am not teaching according to who I am and what I believe) so that I can stick with the safer route of doing what everyone else is doing.?"  These thoughts led me to start pondering what I could change this semester in order to live into who I am and still do a good job at school.

With these thoughts whirring around my head, I started asking myself what I would want my classroom to look like if I had the choice to do whatever I wanted.  Normally, I wouldn't think about that too much because it would just make me frustrated that I felt tied to doing things identically to my colleagues.  But I started investigating and pondering.  My final exam first semester in Spanish 4 was one thing that I complained about, but as I thought about it more, I realized that it was not the final that was the problem, but rather the fact that the tests I gave throughout the semester did not match the final. So I looked into the second semester final to see how different it was from the first one, and it turned out that it was extremely similar.  Completely skill-based.  Writing and speaking, with some integration of cultural knowledge learned over the semester.  Well, based on this finding, I wondered if I could just stop teaching with the same materials as the other teachers and create my own path.  It also helps that we are in the process of curriculum development at school and we will be choosing a new textbook soon.  I started looking through one of the sample textbooks we had and exploring the units on our share drive to see the textbook material would be enough to roughly follow what my colleagues were doing, while giving me more room to experiment and devise new assessments.  The more I looked into it, the more confident I became that I really wanted to take this step.  I wanted to see what teaching could be like when I could teach with a vision, rather than just following the pre-made tests.

Thus, I proposed to my lead teacher that I wanted to pilot the textbook everyone like most at the vendor presentations, and in addition, I wanted to change my assessments so completely that they would be 100% different from those that the other Spanish 4 teachers were using, in order to match more completely with the final exam.  She was on board, so we set up a meeting with the assistant principal and proposed the idea to him.  He was also very supportive.  So once it was approved, I informed my two fellow level 4 teachers and started letting the reality of the new semester sink in.  Then I got nervous because I was officially crossing into uncharted waters.  I had so many ideas floating around in my head, I didn't know which ones to grab onto, or how to organize them.

I started this post a week ago (it is no longer Wednesday (1/29) as my post says at the start), so currently, I am in the third week of the semester.  And I am excited about teaching.  I feel so thankful for this opportunity.  I am loving every minute of Spanish 4!  This freedom that I've been given in my planning is allowing me to try new things and go at a pace that, while slower, allows deeper learning to take place.  Every day, the focus is on reading and writing and listening and speaking!  Woah hey!  Imagine a language class focusing on language skills!  We're skipping the forced grammar lessons in order to have time to write and write and write and see the grammar at work in our writing. We're using the culture info as a means to write and talk, a guide for our topics, not simply facts to be memorized.

Two nights ago my students were assigned to read about the geography of Spain and take notes for homework.  Yesterday in class, their warm-up/journal was to describe the geography from memory.  Then they worked in pairs to answer questions about the geography.  For homework they were to respond to the same prompt from the warm-up in a more formal paragraph.  Then today we did a speaking warm-up.  I gave the students about 2 minutes to review their geography notes/reading.  Then in groups of 4 each student spoke for 1 minutes, with each students assigned a specific region to describe.  The homework tonight was to edit their paragraph about the geography and write a final copy to be turned in.  I will read their paragraphs, edit, and give them feedback.  To me, this is the learning process.  This is how my students will truly learn valuable skills and practice using their Spanish.  It is wonderful to give them more time to learn and grow, rather than saying write a paragraph, but we don't really have time to do anything else with it because there are a ton of other things we have to cover before the assigned test date.  And my students are with me!  I don't have any hard data, but I sense an increase in engagement and motivation.  I can convince the students that what we are doing is worthwhile because I believe it is worthwhile, and the students can see it too.  That's hard to do with rushing through topics and only touching the surface.  How do you convince a student something is worthwhile when you're not giving them time to really process what they're working on?

Anyhow, this post is getting ridiculously long and my thoughts are straying from topic to topic.  I feel like I could just keep babbling about different things I'm trying and my thought process behind my planning and such, but this "essay" is long enough.

To return to my initial sentiments from when this post began, God is so good.  He offers so much to us without expecting us to work for it.  And that's what I tend to forget.  No matter how many times I hear no matter how hard I work I cannot EARN God's favor & gifts, I try to work for them anyhow.  Recently, I started thinking about how receiving is truly hindered by attempting to work.  Because I work myself so hard and then wondering how I'm not feeling God's peace and joy and guidance.  Probably because I'm not actually receiving them, my hands are so full working on all the things that I think I should be working on, attempting to earn something.  Now, each day I have been reminding myself to accept what God is offering me.  And in doing so, I am excited to work for the Lord because I am filled.  Glora a Dios.  Alabo al Señor y declaro que Él es el rey de mi vida.  Vivo por él y para él.