i don't bake my old students into yummy treats so i can keep them forever (or until they got moldy?)... but i like baking and i like old students who still love me.
sara and i have been doing a lot of baking lately. this year we've done banana muffins, zucchini muffins, banana oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. the banana muffins are the best for getting rid of nigerian bananas which go brown way too fast. banana oatmeal chocolate chip cookies are SUPER easy and pretty healthy for a cookie -- no sugar, no butter. literally its bananas, oatmeal, chocolate chips, a little oil and salt.. shazaam. deliciousness. carrot cake with cream cheese frosting was our latest success... it was the first time i made homemade carrot cake and homemade frosting in general. super yum.
old students are wonderful. within the last week i received two out-of-the-blue emails from old students. they wanted to let me know that they missed me and filled me in on school life. weird to think that the 8th graders i taught when i just started as a teacher are now juniors in high school. time flies, time flies. my old 3rd graders are also visiting me pretty frequently and two of them dedicated their language arts poems to me.
these are two things that keep me sane when life is full of frustrations, which it has been recently. oddly enough, i'm not so frustrated with nigeria and life here... but rather with school. i have very little patience for stupid shenanigans and it seems like there's just so much of it lately. i wonder all the time if i'll be able to stick with teaching for the rest of my life. i don't want to add to that statistic of teachers who leave the profession before 5 years hit, but so many older teachers talk to me about how teaching has become such a burden compared to in the past, and even i can see how education has transformed from when i was a student to now as a teacher. i absolutely love classroom & teaching time, getting to know and be there for my students, being the person that gets to trigger the lightbulb..... but all the other things that we deal with on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis are pretty hard to ignore. ... and what would i do if i were not a teacher? what would YOU do if you weren't in your current profession? why is this post titled BOSS?
You are way too gifted and talented as a teacher to consider leaving it. Eventually, if you do it long enough (like I have), you will be able to ignore a lot of the other stuff and just focus on what you are really there to do and you do that so well :)
ReplyDelete1) i'm so glad you posted this because i was wanting to hear from you super bad just now. so now i feel a little less restless :)
ReplyDelete2) your post is called BOSS because you talked about Baking, Old Students, and School. B-OS-S. it took me only seconds to get that. so proud of myself.
3) i feel you on the school part. no pep-talk, sorry. let's just be there for our students, no matter what, as long as we're in this teaching business.
4) yeah nevermind about #1 i still miss you bad.
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ReplyDeleteJordan, you are currently living a life most people could only dream of...that is if their dreams can reach that high.
ReplyDeleteCousin Kelly
Hey Jordan, I came across this New York Times article on teachers and principals this morning.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/nyregion/the-secrets-of-a-good-principal.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y