My winter break didn't start until mid-day on December 21, but it wonderfully continues through this whole week. I've spent the better part of this 2-plus weeks feeling like I'm finally getting over a long, stubborn illness. Part of that is because I did finally kick the cold symptoms that had been hanging on since Thanksgiving. An even bigger part, though, is feeling as if the veil of depression that settled over me at the end of May has begun to lift.
I've been struggling this year, much more than I should be. I'm not in grad school anymore. I'm only teaching three subjects. I have right around 100 students. I've got way better technology to help manage student science project work. But I still have felt nearly continuous anxiety, and often struggled to get lessons planned and materials prepped without feeling like I was doing everything at the last minute.
I struggled to make sense of it, because I objectively had much less work than I've had for the past 4 years. I don't have to upload ridiculously detailed lesson plans, two weeks in advance, by 8AM every Monday, for example. Nor am I leading and documenting weekly PLC meetings. Nor am I participating in three child study teams... but still. I am doing many lessons "from scratch", even though the curriculum is by the same publisher as at my last school, and so big chunks are substantially the same... but the standards are not, which makes me a first-year teacher again, in some respects. Integrating engineering, modeling, scientific argumentation... awesome, but time consuming, since my curriculum is not aligned with the NGSS.
I'm tired of being new and having to create everything from the ground up. Now, at the halfway point, I have a ridiculously long To-Do list, and I'm only about halfway through it. Last year I was too exhausted to do much of anything over the break, but I have more discipline this year and will knock off the rest of the list over the next four days. (And then it's back to work.)
Throughout this year I have been aiming for a better work/life balance, and to that end, I've put more energy into meal planning and prep than I did last year... but last year, DD was home and a big help on that front. But there's only so much I can do in a day, and over the past 5 months there have been a lot of days where, after dinner, I just didn't work because I couldn't push myself to.
That's the big difference between this year and last: needing to push myself to get anything done. I'm relieved the low-key anxiety underlying everything seems to have dissipated. Perhaps now all the little (and not-so-little) teacher tasks I have to do won't seem like such a burden.
