handwritten on April 3, 2020
30 minutes of lifting: I go through periods of time I think where I feel like life is beyond my control and therefore to cope, I usually clean. In fact, my colleagues know that my classroom is never the cleanest so when they saw my apartment this week they both looked at me and said, "Your husband must be the neat one." And he responded, "Nope. not me."
Tonight it was about 1:00 in the morning and because I had fallen asleep earlier, I cleaned quite literally everything. I cleaned our fridge, I cleaned and sorted our pantry. Today I plan on cleaning the floors and vacuuming and dusting and perhaps going over the floors with a mop and some cleaning liquid.
Sometimes when the world is chaos...
handwritten on April 2, 2020
3.5 miles: As most teacher know- days can sometimes be beautiful or rocky within a classroom. Add in virtual technology and trying to teach and you get mostly rocky days.
And if we aren't careful, sometimes those rocky days make us feel a bit grumpy. Well Thursday was a grumpier day for me. We had some technology kinks, we had some other kinks and just the all around kink of realizing you aren't actually doing your job to its full potential. Because once again, the end of the year in an elementary classroom is a time to enjoy each other's company, to create, to live, to laugh, to love and to close a chapter successfully so students are able to move into their new grade and their new...
handwritten on April 1, 2020
We were allowed to go into our classroom for a small window we signed up for...to gather any books we may need for the remainder of our online instruction.
I made my husband go with me because I knew I would need the support. Talk about depression when you see a completely empty school in the middle of the school year with dark hallways and complete silence. I walked into my room and I just took a minute to take in everything from my second home (as I always say.) The room was clean, colorful but sad. Student desks sat there looking completed sorrowful, the chalkboard untouched and the laughter gone.
A classroom is a mere shell. It's the people inside that bring it to life. I think if...
handwritten on March 31, 2020
You know...
you think you know your students until you see them
inside their homes
interacting with their parents and their siblings
on the couch or wrapped up in their favorite blanket
or showing you their pet they always talked about but you never actually saw
I can quite literally be a fly on the wall of the homes in which they live
and you learn so much more from the surroundings your students experience every day
and their relationships
and the laughter you hear in the background
or when a mom makes her child an egg sandwich for breakfast and slides it under their nose during instruction
every family is different
but my students have beautiful families and they are loved
each and every...
handwritten on March 30, 2020
Monday was morning meeting mustache day
I scared my husband when he came back from work
I suppose he isn't used to seeing me with a curled stache made out of pen
and a tiny little beard
I think more than ever, I wish I could disguise my days with a clear filtered
strip of paper that makes the washed out colors into vibrant pinks and purples and oranges
I wish we could disguise the virus
make it something it isn't so that we can freely move about again
I wish we could disguise our feelings of sometimes sadness or the feeling like
we aren't doing enough because we can only do so much or the feeling that
we will never return to our normal lives again whatever normal actually means
at this...
