Almost spring break
When I was in college, Thanksgiving and Spring Break felt more like stays of execution than actual breaks wherein one took time off. Because of my inability to not procrastinate, they became periods when I would frantically rush to catch up on all the backlogged work I had still to complete, or more likely, freeze up in panic and still not get anything useful done while pretending to be enjoying myself with my friends or family or whatever.
Now that I’m teaching, it seems nothing has changed at all.
This week was spent trying to teach while recovering from the plague. (Rather unsuccessfully, I might add. I’ve been coughing up my lungs all week, and the students don’t seem to be getting it.) Two more days remain in class before the end of the quarter and the start of spring break, and I hope to use them to the students’ advantage. I feel sometimes like many of them are trying not to learn–but I cannot believe that is true. Even though the simple fact is that many are not doing their homework. Which only snowballs the difficulty going forward. If you don’t practice a language, you simply cannot learn it effectively. I cannot be bogged down by the students who won’t try. But I must also look at my own practices. Am I providing enough encouragement to dig in? Am I truly offering out a lit candle by which my students might light their own?
Which leads us to the problems that I must address over spring break. Two–or more–months of apartment cleaning, much and more writing to be done for my literacy intervention class, lesson planning galore, grading…and somehow getting my head into the correct space to teach Latin again. I feel ready to give up. I would already have done so if I weren’t on the hook for the education of almost 100 individuals. I now know why teachers burn out. Thanks to our new glorious Republican administration in NC, it’s going to be easier still. But I am not giving up yet.