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I'm not quite ready to end this school year

5/17/2017

I’m almost done with school. Smackah, track, documentation of goals, a huge round of feedback to students (and so many other things) have finally rounded a bend, and I can actually choose what to do next. I can choose what is important and not urgent. I was on my computer, chatting with students online about their work today, and I looked up.

I immediately made eye-contact with a student and we smiled at each other.

I watched my students. I watched them all focused on crafting their weekly emails, and I watched them quietly talk, point to their screens, smiling. I circulated the room and saw how engrossed they were in their emails, where they were telling their parents (and extended family for many) about their work and learning in all classes. They were uploading links to their work. I clicked open their documents and the links to their final projects.

Almost every student reflected that they loved writing. Almost every student said that first.

I’m not ready for the end of the year. Oh, I’m ready to sleep in, and I’m ready to choose each and every moment of my day, but I’m really not ready to be done. I’m tired and overwhelmed, but I’m not pushed to my limit. I’m still peddling faster than I’m going forward, but I’m still good with peddling.

For weeks, people have been asking me if I’m ready for the end of the year, and I am always so uncomfortable with that question. I’ve been all-out for months with teaching, track, and Smackah. I’ve been behind in just about everything (feedback and grading for students, emails, laundry, cleaning, calling my parents, texting my brother and sister, helping out my team and grade level, feeding the cats (kidding)). But that just makes me less than ready to be done. I want to settle back in to a relatively normal school life, where I can enjoy moments.

I’m exhuasted, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to be done with the school year. Oh, I’ll get used to it once school is done for the year, but I’m never ready to end the school year.

I also feel awkward when teachers pass by me and say, “Hey, it’s almost Friday.”
I also feel awkward when people gripe about Mondays (well, except I do simply because I don’t know how to get out of bed in the morning and get myself going:).

I love my job, so I don’t look for the weekend and again, I enjoy it once it comes, but I don’t wait all week for it. And I don’t hate Mondays.

And I don’t need the end of the year. Well, I do. I’ll decompress and re-energize, and it will be so good and so needed. But I don’t see that through the trees.

When I looked up today, finally, at my students, not at their words on their documents, and their pictures on my screen, I realized I needed some real time with them again. We’ve all been so busy working, we’re not interacting in a relaxed, human way. So, I will spend as much time as I can this last week to see their faces as they work, as they interact with their peers.

It is gratifying, in a way, to realize how seriously my students take their work. To realize how the classroom feels like a place of business, with everyone doing their jobs. But we’ve all been so busy that I’ve missed being silly with them.

That’s important. But it’s feeling urgent too. There are only 6 days left.

Gratitude: getting back to important.
Goal: pack in as much interaction with my students as I can in this short time before summer break.

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Happy Smackah Love

5/11/2017

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I am stepping away from some urgent for some important. I learned that expression quite a few years ago at a leadership conference. We often have to focus on urgent, not important. My urgent is finishing up some grading I’m behind on, emails, laundry…

My important now is some pretty important things. Saturday is our seventh annual Happy Smackah. Braden Stevenson is our recipient this year, and he and his family are in need of our help, and we are honored to have a part in helping.

I always get reflective this time of year, as the Smackah approaches. Our friends and community created this for us. Most of the original crew are still involved, and others have eagerly joined to make the Happy Smackah a St.Vrain Valley tradition. I’m so humbled by how hard this community, our friends, and so many people I don’t even know, work to come together to make someone else’s life better.

And, of course, I remember where I was, when Danny and I needed so much support.

My memories of Danny’s hospitalization, the trauma, have been brought a little too close to home though. My cousin’s daughter is in critical condition, in a coma, fighting for her life, and she has been for weeks. My cousin just posted that she finally went home from her bedside vigil for her daughter today after three weeks.

I’ve been in contact with her and her brother, who is back down in Texas with her. I’ve privately asked her brother about a few things, a few thoughts I had about coping during these times. They both latched on to my advice. At one point, I said, in a private message, that I understood, but that wasn’t much help. My cousin said, “It absolutely is.”

That brought me to some big tears. That brought me a humility I felt with my whole being.

I have been sending every single fiber of prayer and positive thinking to my cousins. To my little cousin fighting for her life, to my (still think of as little cousins but who are now amazing adults) cousins every day, throughout the day.

At the risk of sounding cliche, philosophical, or spiritual, or trite, Danny and I often recognize that what he went through, what we went through, is a gift. It’s a gift to be recognizable and relatable to others who are going through suffering.

My cousins are suffering, and it is all too familiar. I have said this often: when I felt at my lowest when Danny was battling, I would go over to Children’s Hospital and get a reality check. Danny and I have been lucky to have what we have. To have a child fight...well, that’s different.

So, here are my cousins, fighting, fearing. I don’t have any wisdom, and yet they do find comfort in knowing I know. It’s so deeply humbling.

Danny and I have an expression for these moments, when we feel this grace, this connection to others simply because people trust that we understand. It happens in our lives with friends, old friends and strangers. We say, “It’s a lot.” We mean it in every sense of what that sounds like. We mostly mean it’s a lot that we are gifted with and humbled by.

And on Saturday, the seventh annual Happy Smackah is for a young man who embodies the spirit of the Happy Smackah. He is a fighter and happy and brave. We are all so pleased to come together to help Braden and his family.

Goal: reach out to others more. Healing, hope, and love for my cousins.
Gratitude: others who reach out to us.

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NEW SOL Post

5/1/2017

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A few weeks ago was my first Slice of Life post, and it was funny. Well, I tried to make it funny. Today’s is not.

I have horrible hearing. I have to blast the tv to hear it. My husband is the opposite. He gets up in the morning and rides the exercise bike in the loft, watching sports center on the tv, which is below, in the great room.

I can’t hear the tv standing next to it while he’s on the bike. He can hear it just fine over the spin of the wheels. Yes, I’m hard of hearing. Though, I do manage to still have that great teacher hearing. That’s right, kiddos. I can hear you just fine!

Back to my hearing. Aside from the classroom kid hearing, I have a new gift. I’m Radar.

Probably most of you don’t know who Radar O’Reilly is.

The popular 70’s show MASH, was set in Korea at a mobile army hospital. It had a wonderful cast of characters, and Radar was the company clerk, and he could hear the choppers before anyone else. Pre-nowadays-technology, he was the first to say, “Choppers.” A huge gift that prepared the nurses and surgeons for the incoming wounded they would treat at mobile hospital.

I can hear choppers now too, before anyone else. Even Danny.

When Danny got sick, after hours of surgery, his surgeons said his only chance would be to be airlifted to Anschutz in Denver. After hours of being told he wouldn’t survive, this last chance was a desperate hope. My friends drove me to their house, where they had to look up the address for Anschutz hospital, and where we had to grab supplies for what we knew would be a long days and weeks at the hospital. Luckily, it was months, not days. He survived. But. That was a long time to fight.

So, when we left the hospital as they were preparing him for the flight, we drove to our friends’. I had no idea that he hadn’t left the hospital yet. I was standing alone in their driveway, on February 11th, 2011. The flight for life chopper went right overhead, and I looked up, feeling like he’d just touched me and said, come and get me. For the first time that day, after being told with solemn assurance that he would die, I had hope. It was a distant hope, nebulous and surreal.

And I heard “Fortunate Son” by Credence Clearwater Revival.

A lot of people ask me if I had hope right away, and I tell them honestly, that I didn’t. The doctors were quite clear how sick he was. They operated for hours and called surgeons across the country. All of the brilliant doctors said he didn’t have a chance.

But a surgeon at Anschutz said he’d still try to save him. He would have to do aggressive surgery, and if it worked, he’d have weeks and months of lots of touch and go...and. Likely, he still wouldn’t survive.

I was asked if they could try to save him.

I remember being in shock and being concerned about what they might need to do. But I asked them to try.

But when Danny flew right over me. Well. That was a sign.

And I’m reminded of that every time I hear a chopper.

I just heard one. I’m home, and I heard it coming. I heard the thumping before it became the resonating deep timber of the rotating blades.

I hear like Radar. I’m the first out the door, scanning the skies.

It hits me first with a deep traumatic sensory memory. Then it shifts as I look to see if it’s military, other. Or flight for life.

It was flight for life, and I stilled myself, praying that the person in the chopper would be okay, and sending bountiful gratitude for the flight for life crew and the doctors, nurses, everyone. All these people who deal with trauma day in and day out. All in service to others.

Gratitude: medical people.
Goals: remind myself of my gratitude for everything.

Self-evaluation:
I cried when I wrote this, so I’m guessing some of my emotion got through in this. I like to feel moved when I write. I should always smile, cry, laugh, wonder, when I’m writing. I don’t think that I stayed enough on topic though. The slice of life was supposed to be about hearing choppers well, and I feel like I didn’t come around to that as well as I should have. It was also hard to reference being “Radar” to an audience who is unfamiliar with the impact of that. But, my audience can internet search “MASH” and “Fortunate Son”.

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I'm not quite ready to end this school year

Happy Smackah Love

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