P.S. to Returning to Work

Normally, I do not post anything on my blog two days in a row, but after what I wrote yesterday, I felt like I needed to do a follow up. Yesterday, I wrote up a blog post where I detailed how I was dreading coming back to work today for the first day of school and how mentally, emotionally, and physically, I did not feel in the least bit prepared to teach, even after attending IFLT and taking a Fluency Fast course. Quite honestly, I was feeling rather defeated.

I am home now from the first day of school, and wow, what a difference a day can make. The impasse about teaching which I was experiencing yesterday has been broken through. I had a wonderful first day back with students! It was as if a switch had been turned on in me when that first period bell rang, because suddenly I was back into teacher mode. How I enjoyed interacting with my students from last year and with new ones! My mind is now back in "work mode," and "summer mode" has been filed away. While yesterday my mind was parched even entertaining the thought of teaching, it is as if the floodgates have been opened. Whereas yesterday, i was struggling and laboring to come up with any type lesson plans, now my mind is racing with ideas from this summer, as I try to think of how to incorporate what I learned from Linda Li in her Fluency Fast class and from observing Annabelle Allen at IFLT into my curriculum. Tomorrow my Latin 1 and 2 teams are going to be implementing Circling with Balls and TPR in our classrooms, and I am really looking forward to it. There is joy and excitement in me now when I think about teaching. 

I wish that I could pinpoint exactly what caused this shift in my mindset from yesterday to today. I do not feel like I had somehow built up all of this negativity in my mind to be something bigger than it actually was, nor do I feel that I was over-reacting. I can tell you with confidence what I was feeling was quite real. Maybe I just needed to dive into it all head first. Maybe it was being back with students. Maybe it was feeling like a united team with my fellow Latin teachers. Maybe my years of teaching just kicked in and took over instinctually.

Teaching is a series of good days and bad days. That is something which I just need to accept, as I cannot expect to hit a homerun every day. We, however, cannot experience the fullness of those good days without the bad days. Therefore, I look forward to the good, the mediocre, and the bad days which I will experience this upcoming school year.