Had we but world enough, and time

I work in a very strange profession. I have a job that most people agree is important, yet is one of the lowest paying jobs a professional can have. Everyone has an opinion about how the job should be done: legislators, religious leaders, parents, people on the street. I can't think of another profession where people with no training or experience in your field think they can advise you on how best to do your job.

Unlike other professions, where a person builds in responsibility with experience and newbies are given time to develop skills on lower-level projects, mine is a profession where you get the full enchilada on day one. Either you survive, or you quit.

Yep you guessed it, I teach. Public school. Middle school.

Every year since I began, I have been asked to do more, with less money, and more importantly less time.

Time is the part that rankles me.

Every single day I produce six engaging, edifying lessons which both push the gifted students and provide support for the struggling students without losing the interest of students at any other level. Each lesson is supposed to help each child become a 21st century learner and foster literacy skills. I utilize a variety of ever-changing forms of technology and teach the children to do so as well. I am maintain contact with 130 families, informing each parent of whatever struggles and problems their child faces in my classroom. I maintain a website that details everything that is happening in my classroom and provides resources students and parents can use at home. I am also my own secretary--making all my own copies, creating my own documents, collating, stapling, and filing. I am my own housekeeper as well, cleaning tables, whiteboards, chairs, etc.

To accomplish all this, I get two "prep periods" a day. This is teacher talk for the time during the day when you do not have supervisory duty (no students in your room). My two prep periods are one hour and six minutes and thirty-three minutes in duration (if I count my lunch, too). However, I rarely get all ninety-nine minutes. There are meetings one to three times a week, too. I try to eat lunch most days.

Because I am utterly amazing, and because I can now pull from sixteen years of classroom experience, I manage to produce lessons that please me more often than not. But I am always always always behind on assessment--paper grading, providing meaningful feedback to the kiddos to help them grow. I am frustrated 100% of the time because of time--99 minutes a day is not enough to do the preparation work at the level it should be getting done at. No matter how efficient I become, the work will never fit in the work day.

When I look at the work days of friends who do not teach, I get very jealous. When one friend is asked to make a presentation (one presentation--I make six daily), she is relieved of her other duties for three days so she can prepare. When another friend was asked to use a new form of technology, he was sent to a week-long training session at company expense and given three day workshops as follow up quarterly for a year.

Gah! What I could do! The amazing things I could do, if my profession had respect for the time it takes to do it well.

Once I had a teaching job with adequate time. It was awesome! I taught for a summer program at Johns Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth. I taught one class of fifteen kids for two sessions a day. I had four hours a day to prep one lesson and do any assessment. Because it was a summer program, I didn't have to maintain a website or keep in contact with the kids' parents on a daily basis. For the first time in my teaching career, I felt like I was doing it justice. I wish teaching could always be like this.

It's not, though. So, why teach?

At its worst moments, it's like . . . spitting into the wind, herding cats, banging your head against a wall, hammering on cold iron, whistling in the dark, fiddling while Rome burns, tiptoeing through a minefield blindfolded, trying to make a silk purse from a sow's ear.

Why teach? Because, at its best moments, it's like . . .touching the future, bridging the abyss, grounding live wires, opening doors, awakening sleeping giants, lighting the lamp that illuminates the world.

Really if you are a teacher, there's nothing else you could do. It's the only thing that feels right.

But I'll continue to wish for more time. I know, I know. If wishes were horses . . .

The days are long, but the years are short

So, I'm reading The Happiness Project right now. I don't want to write a book review right now, but I will say that the book surprised me pleasantly. I've gotten much more from it than I expected.

What I do want to write about is one line from the book, my title: the days are long, but the years are short. During this time of my life when I'm feeling like time goes so incredibly quickly, I read this line and immediately wrote it down as a Great Truth. Yes! That's it, exactly!

T and I are always having conversations about something that just happened, then realizing that whatever it was actually happened months or even years ago. A few months ago, we had our fifth wedding anniversary. Five years? How the heck did that happen? I'm sure it was just last week that we were trying to decide if we should date.

So, what's making the days so long, but the years short? In short: kids. When T and I deciding to join forces in the good fight, we already had one kid from my first marriage, M. Plus, I have somewhere between 120 and 150 kids each semester. Then there was N, our younger girl. Our hurricane.

My mother told me, when I spoke of having a second child, "You should know, Samantha. Two children is not double the work. It is exponentially more work." I nodded sagely, but, of course, I didn't understand. It's one of those things you can't understand until you've experienced it firsthand, like being in love.

She was right you know. Two children is definitely way more than double the work. But it is also way more than double the wonder, double the joy, double the love. It's fast, furious, crazy, stressful and wonderful.

My legs hurt after a long day of teaching today. My girls told me to put my feet up, made me a cup of hibiscus tea (because it's pink), and then made me the middle of a cuddle sandwich that lasted the better part of an hour. Now that's the way to end a long day.

Why Everyone Should Have a Meal Plan

So, I've found my little key to calmness in this chaos we call family life: meal plans.

Like every family, we struggle to balance everyone's needs and wants. Mom wants to go to a reading on Thursday, so Dad will have to handle the playdate transportation. Big Sis needs a trip to the library for a school project, so Little Sis will have to be patient and quiet in the "big kid" section.

We're really really really organized about this. We got gmail accounts for all of us (the littlest got one within days of being born) and shared all the calendars, so we can color code everyone's commitments. That helps--at least we can get a clear picture of what kind of chaos we're in for in a given week.

But the key is the meal plan.

It makes me feel a little like Donna Reed or maybe June Cleaver to say it, but you've got to have a meal plan. Having the week's menu planned out in advance saves time, energy and calories. It relieves stress. Plus, everyone gets to eat!

Each weekend, my husband and I shut ourselves away from the children for an hour or so and sit down for the planning meeting. We examine each day and talk through all the commitments, deciding what needs to be cut and what gets prioritized. Part of this is figuring out how to get everyone fed. Who will prepare what and when? Will we get to eat all together? Then the meal plan becomes a grocery list and someone goes shopping.

The planning meeting is a vital part of the weekend for me. It's our guaranteed time to touch base. Making these decisions together is bonding time. I think it's something T started doing for me, because I'm a real plan-ahead girl. Whatever it is, I want to know at least a week in advance. But now, he values the time, too. In taking care of the girls' needs, it can be hard to finish whole sentences and both of us really value this chance to set priorities together, even if it's just one week at a time.

Sometimes, I think it's the only thing that keeps my head above water: I know what's for dinner.

So, any given day, I get home from school, probably exhausted, definitely brain dead. If I had to decide on what to prepare at a moment like that, we would eat a lot of takeout pizza. But luckily, we've already planned it out.

I pull out my iPhone and look at today in the calendar: spaghetti and meatballs, Betsy and garlic bread. (Betsy is a family word for a very simple salad: lettuce, carrots and cucumber. It's named after a friend.) I put the girls on tasks. Big sister can fill a pot with water and put it on to boil. Little sister can get the garlic bread out of the freezer and get Mommy a cookie sheet. I start chopping vegetables. Someone microwaves the meatballs and sauce. And vóila, dinner. It's simple, but not bad for Wednesday night after soccer practice.

By the time Raleigh and the traffic in between lets us have Daddy back, we are ready to eat, at the table or on TV trays while we watch The Avengers cartoon series together.

I lean back and sigh. Yep, we made it through again. Dinner is served.

The Problems with Television Shows

My husband (T) my older daughter (M-age 11) and I are always looking for TV shows to watch together. It's really difficult to find anything that pleases all three of us. Not too scary or too "adult" for the 11 year old, not too dull or hackneyed for the adults. T and I are not easy to please with television. We have little patience for cliche or poor writing. We are a pretty critical audience.

So, we've been watching Castle for the past couple of seasons. The violence and sex are within M's comfort zone. It has Nathan Fillion, an actor we all enjoy (Dr. Horrible, Firefly). It has been clever, but not over my M's head. When it has fallen into predictable patterns (like when the killer several times in a row was the person you met early in the story but thought wasn't important), it righted itself quickly.

We just watched the first episode of season 3 last night. My husband and I, and to a lesser degree, our daughter, had been really disappointed with the ending to season two. For my husband and me, the issue was all the cliches. The show had successfully avoided falling into a lot of traps, but suddenly in the end of season two, we had a main character turn out to be a traitor and one character's personal tragedy morph into a major conspiracy. We thought "Oh, no. There's been a focus group." The disappointment continued into the start of season three. M felt cheated by the love plot line. A lot was promised, then it was snatched away at the last minute.

As we talked about it afterward (the best part of watching TV--talking about it afterward!), I wondered if maybe the problem is with the medium. The writers need to build a long arc tension in the romance department, but ratchet it up enough episode by episode to keep us involved. That push and pull of when to get the male and female lead together (if at all) has been the bane of many a TV show. Shows have just fallen apart when the leads get together. No one seems to be able to write through that transition from "should we?" to "we shall" and beyond.

So, I think it's about pacing. In a movie, or a novel, the writer knows how long she or he has to play with. In a TV series, the writers don't know if the show will run half a season or twelve seasons, so if they let the couple get too close too quickly, they have to keep pulling it back and if they don't go quickly enough, they might not get there at all. They have to create new roadblocks and believable complications, sometimes in the space of just an episode or two, when the build-up took an entire season.

Sometimes, it's smooth. At the end of season one, Kate almost told Castle how she felt, only to find him on the arm of his ex. Opportunity lost. Poor timing. That played well for me.

Season two into season three, however, we had her nearly die. He confesses his love when he thinks he's going to lose her (cliche!) and she pretends not to remember it and doesn't talk to him for three months. In face, she behaves so badly, that all of thought that Castle should dump her. Kate was crossing that line from "I've got history" into "scary damaged goods." Castle is too good a guy for that.

So, Castle, you've got two more episodes to win us back. Or we'll move to other shows. We're worried you might be damaged goods.

Let's try this again

I like the idea of a blog. As someone who aspires to be a novelist, I should be writing all the time. In a way, I am. But the kind of writing I do in my teaching (lesson plans, explanations, classroom website, etc.) doesn't touch the same parts of my brain as my creative writing.

I like that part of my brain. I'd like to be in contact with it more often. It's a nice place, where unexpected connections pop up and fill me with a glow of epiphany. Like when I realized that Kirk and Sherry (protagonists in my novel--working title: His Other Mother) were dealing with many of the same issues that ended my first marriage. I had no idea, until I read a scene aloud to a group of writings I was spending a weekend with and was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness for Kirk and Sherry, the kind of sadness that is more personal than fictional. See, I don't need therapy--just some writing time!

Obviously, I have not, thus far, written much here. I'm hoping to change that. It's nearly Rosh Hashanah. A new school year has begun. This is the time of year that I feel the urge for new resolutions and self-improvement. So, here's the goal this year: write once a week. Here. About anything.

It's not like I've lacked ideas. I just haven't blocked out the time to do anything with them. I have always believed that the key to success in any endeavor is time invested: practice. So, if I want to get more out of my novel-writing time (a few hours every couple of weeks, assuming everyone in the house is healthy), I need to exercise that "creative writing" part of my brain, keep it strong and functioning.

I like me better when I've been writing. I bet other people do too.

So, let's try this again.

Family Life as Germ Warfare

I got strep.

This doesn't usually happen. Usually my children get sick, I nurse them, and then I get sick.

But this time, I started it. I picked it up randomly, at the grocery or the swimming pool or something. No one I know is sick, but I was the first to fall. Then, my older daughter got it. Now my husband has it. We're fighting to try and make sure the baby (age 3) doesn't get it.

I'd never realized before how germy family life is. Once I was recovered enough to think about it (which was right as my older daughter fell ill), I put on my combat gear and set to work.

I wiped every handle, knob, switch and button in the house with clorox wipes. Boy! There are a lot of those. I lysoled the couch. I washed all the bedding and towels on the sanitary cycle. I threw away anything in the fridge that had been eaten from (half finished chicken breast, leftover French fries, unfinished yogurt, etc.). I quarantined big sister in her bedroom, a floor away from the little one.

So, we've been trying to protect ourselves from each other. It's NUTS how many things that entails. We can't buy a smoothie and share it. We can't put the cucumbers in a communal bowl on the dinner table. We can't share a bowl of popcorn (hands in bowl, hands in mouth, hands in bowl, ewwww!) We can't kiss. A hundred times a day, someone starts to do something that would spread contagion and has to stop him or herself.

When we're all healthy, it's amazing what we all share unthinkingly. We all get loco-pops and Little Sister asks to taste mine. I let her. The girls take a bath together. They kiss Daddy in the same spot on his cheek. We pour Little Sister's unfinished stew back in the pot, which Mom and Dad eat as leftovers for lunch the next day. It's a little disgusting when I think about it too much. Maybe in this case, the unexamined life is better. Family life is gross. And that's not even bringing poop and snot into the discussion. EEEEWWWWW!

On Second Chances

When the universe is kind enough to grant you a second chance, you need to grasp it with both hands and squeeze. You need to appreciate it while it's there in front of you and never never never take it for granted.

This time of year, six years ago (amazing that it's already been that long), I thought my life had fallen apart. I was divorcing, moving, changing jobs, everything that comes with starting over. I was 32. Until about a month before this, I thought my long-suffering marriage was on an upswing. There was talk of a second child, a vacation, renovations to the house. But, in one clear moment of lucid honesty, it was over, as it should have been many times before.

For a few months, I lamented. Even at the time, I realized it wasn't the marriage I was grieving for. It was the other things I would be losing: a house I loved, a life in a wonderful small community, a job with great people, my opportunity for a second child, a VW Bug, my independence (temporarily), the ability to do anything at all without my oldest child in tow, my community theater group. There were a lot of things I loved about my life at that point, but none of them were my husband. Him, I really wasn't going to miss. About his absence, I felt relief.

So, since I don't do actual spring-cleaning, I'll do some soul spring-cleaning. I'll remind myself how very lucky I am, after hitting that bottom six years ago, to again have a home I love, in a lovely small town, a good job in a pleasant place with good colleagues, a second child, a sweet if kind of stupid dog, and the very best husband there is.

That last part, that's the balance. That's what I missing before. It's one of those things that, once you have, you can't understand how you lived without it so long. So, I'm keeping him, and encouraging him to keep me in return.

It's both wonderful and terrifying, having what you want. And I'm holding on tightly. And telling them all every day how lucky I feel to have them.