On Monday, our students had a trip to the American Museum of Natural History. After a series of whip-arounds and semi-completed scavenger hunts, we entered the waiting area for the Neil deGrasse Tyson-narrated Dark Universe. Because I saw it this summer with my son, I had the utmost confidence in telling my students it would be the best movie they’ve seen on a school trip and went into a furious synopsis of what they were about to see. One student commented that I should be their science, social studies, ELA, and math teacher.
My colleagues probably didn’t take too kindly to hearing that from him, but I smirked a little.
After the trip, I dragged my feet back home. My shoes felt loose. My sweater felt too tight. I was walking by pushing my ankles forward, so I was walking slower than my body thought. I picked up my son from after school and, upon my return home, I sat on the couch and blacked out for a good 20 minutes. The accidental nap is one of the silver linings in getting older: I was made when I woke up, but happy it happened. It was also a sign that we’re officially in the grind months.
I’m tiiiired. Admitting it is the first step towards invincibility. And caffeine or whatever drug of your choice.
The easy thing is to pretend that we’re a 10 every time we step into the classrooms. We have well-prepared lesson plans. We kept our desks and rooms flawless. Pristine book collections and lightly-alcohol scented whiteboards without a trace of work residue add flourish to our rooms. Our clothes have no wrinkles, our hair perfectly combed, coiffed, or groomed. Our voices never crack and the winter medley of diseases hasn’t stripped our voices of volume and clarity.
Our souls don’t erode at the sight of another “failed” assessment, an unchanged and negative relationship with a student, an adverse observation from our administration, a meeting gone awry. We walked into our rooms and, when any number of people strayed from our expectation, we bounced right back and didn’t take it personally even when it kept happening to our person. Those of us in positions of authority don’t feel overextended and can multitask with octopus-like adroitness.
We feed ourselves lies as appetizers for our half-enjoyed meals midday.
Luckily, a prophet by the name of Michael Jackson once said decades ago, “Just take it slow. We got so far to go.” The idea that we always have it together came from any number of teacher-ed books, teacher evaluation expectations, images of our colleagues whose classrooms we don’t stay in for longer than 20 minutes, and our own expectations. It hurts when we don’t meet our self-notions, so we avoid it through edubabble and redirection.
I’m learning to sit in this pain. How foolish are we to think that having 30 energetic children in front of us soaking up our energies wouldn’t leave us depleted. Why search deep into the universe’s seemingly endless dark matter when we can barely fathom the deepest recesses of ourselves? What’s more, the majority of us have until late spring to early summer. We’re smarter for holding on to a little something so we can restore ourselves at the start of the new year.
It takes us embracing that which makes us human, thus error-prone. It frees us from the responsibility of pretense. Our kids get to appreciate that scene, too.