I went to school as a nursery rhyme character today. Somewhere between Little Bo Peep and Little Miss Muffet.
Last night I was thinking that I would go as my inner super-hero, complete with bright green underwear outside my pants, and I got the costume all sorted out right before bed.
But alas, I could not sleep. I lay awake thinking obsessively about nothing much at all and thinking about teaching and thinking about why I wasn’t sleeping. I prayed. I meditated. I talked to myself. I got up and wrote. I snuggled against my sweetheart. And even when I did sleep, it was not very deep.
Which is all to say that when I woke up I was not feeling terribly super-hero-ish and opted for voluminous skirts and a bonnet instead.
It also meant that when my creative writing class declared that Halloween should be a holiday and why did they have to go to school? I did not have the energy to create enthusiasm and set them free on the world.
“Be brilliant. Be free.”
I often question my choices when it comes to teaching – Monday was a brilliant class, Tuesday acceptable, Wednesday non-existent. There you have it. But I want to listen to the kids and I want them to know that I listen to them, so if I would have been able to rally today and take us all on a fun adventure, I think that would have worked as a nice compromise for them not wanting to be there, but I couldn’t. So, hopefully they won’t end up homeless and broke and say to themselves, “If only Arlyn would have held class on Halloween, my life would have been better.”
I think they won’t and that we’ll just have to try again next week.
It feels like such a fire, this teaching thing, I hope I’m burning out the right things.
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