Hiatus

I haven't felt much like blogging for the past month, and I certainly haven't had much time to carve out for it, so I've let this sort of fall into the pile of things I don't deal with. There are so many changes and of such massive types at school that they feel like they're consuming me. The revisions to our departmental curriculum are causing me to question everything I thought I knew about what it means to be a teacher and to probe my own practices deeply.

So far, I haven't liked what I've seen very much. While I can't say that I've been doing everything wrong, I certainly haven't been doing things to the level that is possible, and now that we actually have someone guiding us to know what we can achieve, I feel like I need to step up my game considerably. Just the thought of the amount of work involved, though, is staggering. Lesson plans take as long as four hours to complete and produce stacks of paper when they're done. I come home at night feeling as though I've been caught in a whirlwind all day long that has just finally dumped me back at my door so I can fall down in relative peace for a few hours before beginning it all over again.

Many of my colleagues are not taking this transition well. I don't know if they're going to stick with it or not. Some of them are really resisting the change with a vengeance. I can understand that the change is hard, and even now, there are some parts of what we're doing that I don't necessarily agree with, but for the most part, I know that what we've been doing is fundamentally flawed and broken. If it's not working, why on earth would we possibly want to keep on doing that same thing? This new way isn't some outlandish methodology; it looks like what I see coming out of other states and programs across the nation.

My main problem with it isn't the validity of what we're being asked to do; it's with my own inability to juggle everything efficiently. I keep having moments of sheer panic and weariness where I just want to fold my arms, put my head on my desk, and cry. I feel even more like Sisyphus than normal, and I know all too well the feeling of that big, gritty stone as it makes its stately progression down the middle of my back on its way back to the bottom of the hill.

If I can just keep focused on my end goal, the students, and the fact that this year will be the worst of it, I think I can endure. So much will be better once we can get through this first bad year of redesign. We'll have a clear purpose and goal, and we can begin to polish and refine. I just hope that I can get there without running away screaming. Right now, it's a very close race, so stay tuned, folks...