swoosh...

The sound that life is making as it zooms by.

Most of last week felt slow, actually. Friday was the last day of school and everyone was a bit crazy because of it. It still hasn't really sunk in.

I have my own schoolwork to finish up, plus packing and all that: leaving on Wednesday.

We'll manage, somehow or other, we always do. It doesn't seem quite real, though.

There will be time for more review and reflection later. For now, discernment continues: do I really want to teach high school, when I love being around the little ones so much? Then I remind myself, I love them all. It's true. Just realized today that the child who inspired me to write this post was in my class for the past two months and totally, completely, not a problem. Not at all a problem to the extent that I just realized that this kid drove me to such distraction last year that I swore I could never be full time teacher. What happened between then and now? Experience, probably. I've learned a lot this year.

I have some ideas about teaching, including the theory that in any particular classroom, someone will rise to the occasion of being the Attention Vortex, no matter what. If the autistic boy is absent or having a really good day, someone else will pick up the slack so that, over the course of the day, there is a Conservation of Classroom Chaos. Sure, it ebbs and flows over the periods, but in any given day, you're going to have approximately the same amount of disruptions and disturbances, no matter who is there and who is missing. Even if all the likely-to-act-up kids are gone for a day, you have things like other kids crying because they can't find their favorite pencil or some other such nonsense -- simply because they know, or they intuitively sense, that there are Resources Available, that is, Teacher Time that would normally be spent "handling" the usual disruptors is being used productively! Can't let that happen! Kids are amazing that way.

I have no more energy to develop that idea further. I noticed many years ago that when I'm writing at work, I have very little creative energy left over to journal with, and that same pattern is repeating now. It's not that nothing's happening, it's that I'm too frazzled to write about it all. I don't particularly like it, but personal writing has been shoved rather far down on the priority list, at least for now. It won't always be this way.