Had I returned to teaching this year, this week would be my fifth week back. Up until last Friday I was still getting the daily email messages sent to my district email account from my prior administration: there were requests to staff for volunteers to sub for absent staff, reminders for the need to get ready for progress reports and grades and information about an accidental lock-down and at least one soft lock down1. Then Friday morning I woke up to error messages on my devices that I needed to login to my district email. I knew it was going to happen and had backed up everything for future projects. But it still caused me pause when I had to disable the account on my devices to silence the error messages.
It was kind of sad to not be able to eavesdrop on whatever was happening at my former school site. Also, the calendar that I kept of my school schedule for the past seven years was attached to that account, so that’s all gone. It was just another level of realizing that, as far as the school district is concerned, I’m really “gone.” At the same time that I’m absorbing all of this, I’m seeing posts and images from two friends who were presenting at separate education related conferences. One was presenting sessions and a keynote in Australia and the other at a Google Conference. So, it’s true, even after one leaves, life goes on.
I didn’t know this growing up, but mom was more of a night-owl, but got up at the crack of dawn with dad to make his breakfast and pack his lunch. I think that they got up so early when we were kids, she’d go back to bed and then wake up to get us off to school. Years later, when we’d all moved out, she retired before dad but she kept the same routine, getting up for him and then going back to bed. Then dad retired. She joked one time that he imagined that he was going to get up and work in the backyard every day (which had been his usual weekend “fun”) and he expected her to hang-out in the backyard patio and watch him admiringly while he worked. Yeah, that didn’t happen. She said she had “things” to do. I joked when visiting them during their retired years, that they always seemed to have one thing to do each day. Maybe it was going to the doctor, or going to Costco or going to In-n-Out Burger (you don’t have to wonder where I got my habit from). So there was how they’d lived their lives before retiring, how they imagined it would be and how it really turned out to be.
I didn’t expect losing my district email account to affect me. I knew it was going to happen and prepped for it by moving all the work I’d done creating my media and robotics curriculum over the past seven years to my own personal storage. Early on I was a bit panicked that it might happen right away when school ended at the end of May, and then thought I’d have to the end of July. I was a little surprised when I still had access as the new school year began at the beginning of August.
True to my working class roots, I stayed busy the last three months, updating my resume, working on my website(s), updating my LinkedIn account, applying for journalism jobs, moving my curriculum from my district google drive and Canvas LMS to my own storage, posting and organizing my Medium account, getting signed up for Medicare, and writing these daily posts. There’s always something to do every day.
One thing I’ve always known about myself is that I am not a fan of having to get up every morning at 5 or 5:30 every morning for the past seven years. So no surprise that I’ve turned off my alarm clock. I easily slipped back to not getting up before 8am. Only strict daily requirement I had for myself is to get my daily writing up on the website and social media at the beginning of the day. But the automation wasn’t working so I had to manually post and I didn’t want to wake up early to do it. I experimented with posting just after midnight so things would be up when the East Coast got up. Not too surprising, I discovered that working up after midnight was “encouraging” me to not get to bed before 3 or 4 in the morning (like I needed much encouragement). And some days I wasn’t feeling what I’m working on was hitting the mark, so I let that post slip and not worry about it being on the website in the morning, as long as it’s on the site and social media before midnight of its designated day. Turns out that whatever reaction I’ve been getting from my writing is much more connected to whatever I’m writing about and doesn’t seem to be at all influenced by what time of day it shows up on the website and social media. It’s just a matter of making sure that I do get enough sleep and not repeat the errors I made for decades when I would only get 4 hours of sleep a night and try to make it up by sleeping in on Saturday or Sunday. Now that every day is potentially Saturday or Sunday, I have to make sure that I get enough sleep every night (or morning) and use each day wisely and not try to get away with no sleep, no conversations and no personal satisfaction.
Two times in the past I found myself without the daily grind and associated renumeration for extended months. Both times I didn’t adjust as well as I would have hoped and feel like I pissed away those months, in part, because I was so stuck to the need to work the 9 to 5 and couldn’t get my head around the opportunity I was being given. That said, I don’t know what I could have done in 1994 or 2014 to get to where I wanted to be. That’s the difference between this moment right now and those previous “adventures” is that I’m doing every day what I want to be doing, writing these posts and crafting these stories and confessions of life and love and fear and hope. And there’s ever the slightest possibility that I might be able to generate income if I can get enough subscribers on the various socials, especially Medium and YouTube which wasn’t possible when I was last challenged with choosing between pursuing my writing and “making a living.” So there’s that.
If you find yourself going through a transition with work, relationships, life…. what do you recognize from previous experiences? What’s new in the situation that’s different from “last time”? And what makes you smile?
- I loved the note saying that classes would be getting visitors during the day and the admin felt the need to include the phrase, “keep teaching,” to the message.[↩]
