Guilt. Where does the line lie?

I feel guilty.  Yet I feel right.  How does one reconcile that?

I feel guilty because out of about 50 rough drafts turned in by my students today, I have reviewed and made suggestions on five.  If we don't have the corrected drafts for class tomorrow, I will have to change my lesson plans at the last minute.  I put in five paid hours a day at work.  Grading all the papers would have taken me another two or three hours, ballpark. 

I feel right because my family is my MOST. IMPORTANT. JOB.  When I leave the school, I need to turn off "school me" and turn on "mommy me."  Other than an evening email check in case of urgent questions about homework, I try to leave work behind me when I come home. 

But still, the guilt.  The feeling that tomorrow will be utterly overwhelming because I left something undone today. 

Lord, Please help me to make peace with my humanity and my imperfection, with myself.  Please help me to adjust and cope.

A position of confidence

Much of the time I have a lot of self-doubt, especially related to my job.  Only my relationship with Jesus gives me the strength I need day to day.  But occasionally something comes up where I am able to speak up confidently, using the knowledge and experience the Lord has given me to approach an issue on solid ground.

Today my child's kindergarten teacher pulled my husband aside at drop-off and said that our son is behind in his reading.  Behind in filling out bookmarks, that is, compared to the other kids.    In certain situations, such as if he were truly struggling in reading, I would meet this with meekness and humility, asking help in an area where I need it.  However it is refreshing to sometimes be able to speak confidently.  This is the body of the email I wrote his teacher (also a coworker of mine, so it's a situation requiring extra tact in which I am usually pretty deficient):

Dear Teacher,
My husband said you talked to him about B's reading today.  That's good, he could be more involved, but I happen to know that B is a good reader and I am not at all concerned about him.  I taught the Abeka curriculum at the first grade level at MMCS for six years, I have a master's degree in elementary education and did my thesis on reading at the first grade level, and I am very confident that B will be more than ready for first grade.  He is reading just as well as my girls did at the same point in Kindergarten and they are all straight A students.   

I have four kids and I am working now, and I guess I don't have the time the other kids' parents do to spend hours apparently racking up bookmarks.  It is quality, not quantity, that counts with me and I am very happy with the quality of his reading.  He also reads to me every night at bedtime from one of his story books and I never write that down, having too much else to do to worry about busy-work record-keeping like that.

You have done a great job teaching B to read and we appreciate it, and I feel great about him starting first grade in the fall. 

If I weren't sure that I am right, I would lie awake feeling a lot of self-doubt and praying for Brian's reading and stressing myself out that I am failing.  Well, I will save that for another situation because I know Brian is doing great and I really don't care how many little colored bookmarks he has completed.  I have confidence through my years of parenting and teaching that I don't need to worry about Brian's reading.  I am so grateful to God for this and I lift up praise to Him right now for small victories.  I am wrong so so so often.  It is so merciful of Him to let me be right now and then.

I am average.

You know what?  I am not setting the world on fire at my teaching job.  I depend on the Lord daily to guide my plans and my actions, and I know He is enabling me to do the work, but I am an average teacher at best.  I don't invite students to hang out in my classroom during lunch.  I don't stay late or come early to tutor the struggling ones.  Sometimes certain students know more than I do about grammar and vocabulary.  I  have a hard time with students who don't do well or who don't try, even when I know that they don't have very good support at home or a history of academic success.  I don't use the latest technology.  I tried to make a class website and gave up.  I didn't do a very good job of tracking some of my students' late and missing assignments last quarter and consequently their grades were affected.

So what do I bring to the job?  An assurance that the Lord put me in this position and He will enable me to do it.  A passion for reading and a desire for all to love to read, to be able to write decently, and to have adequate English skills so that they seem educated and not ignorant.  I bring love for each and every one of my middle schoolers.  They are so precious.  I wish each one could know and believe that.  Even if I told them, they wouldn't internalize it, they would just cast it off like one more greeting on a Hallmark card.  I pray for them when they struggle.  I praise them when they succeed, to their faces and to their other teachers and their parents.  I try hard to stay on top of my grading; if they put work in, I should respect that by putting my part of the work in in a timely way. 

I am feeling inadequate today.  I want them all to succeed.  Do all teachers feel like this?

Home

When we moved here to Newville, California in 2010, I had the chance to buy a new house, to upgrade our lifestyle.  We wanted "property," not just another cookie cutter subdivision house.  We insisted on a pool, and enough bedrooms for our kids.  Oh, the houses we saw.  The gorgeous kitchens with granite counter-tops, cabinets made of beautiful honey-colored wood, shining stainless steel appliances . . . . sigh.   We didn't get a-one of 'em.  God seemed to have other plans.  All our offers were rejected, or someone else beat us to it (once with a lower offer, but a faster realtor).  It felt like time was running out.  Our family was separated, with Daddy living here while the rest of us still lived in Oldville,  and if we didn't get going soon we would miss the start of the upcoming school year in our new city.

Daddy would preview homes and I would bring the kids down to see them with the realtor every couple of weeks.  One week he sent me a list of homes to see with the realtor including this reposessed home with hideous interior pictures and an indoor pool.  WHO WANTS AN INDOOR POOL IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA???  That definitely didn't fit in with my fantasies of sitting poolside with an iced tea and a magazine while the lil darlings splashed around in the sunshine.

All it took was the gate.  The house had me at the gate.  Not a shiny new gate with fancy keypads and intercoms, either.  A rusty, broken gate with no form of communication to the house, which our little bitty realtor had to shove open with her shoulder and slide along the track, propping it open with a rock so it wouldn't slide back shut on our cars as we drove through.  

From the driveway I called Daddy and said, "I WANT THIS ONE."  He said, "Well, OK, but maybe you should go inside first.  It needs a lot of work."  And I said, "OK, but I WANT THIS ONE.  I'm just saying."

So we bought it, and it turned out the romance of an huge old house with a lot of cool features and also a lot of broken, rusty features, 30 year old carpet, and rats, was not quite living up to my expectations.  Well, basically the husband was not living up to my expectations because renovations have continued at a snail's pace in the nearly two years since we bought the place.   But sometimes when  a new person comes over, they see the house as I did two years ago--all the beauty and promise, and none of the ugly 80's fixtures that have yet to be updated, none of the relentlessly growing weeds and dead fruit trees and overgrown cactus. 

And so tonight I sit down to write this post in the wake of a visit from one of those appreciative people who has reminded me that this is where the Lord chose for us to be.  He could have made any one of those other houses come through, but He didn't.  He chose this home for us, this home that I fell in love with at first sight.  And sometimes just as in a marriage we need to be reminded of how we felt when we first fell in love, so too with my home I need to be reminded of that.  I am finally confident that we are where the Lord wants us to be, and that if I am patient and seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, all the contentment of my heart will be provided.

Bedtime

My children are older now.  "Older" meaning they can brush their own teeth, put on their own pajamas, even read to themselves.  And yet . . . bedtime.  Both awaited eagerly by a tired mom, and dreaded for the hour-long routine required to bed down the four of them.   All of the kids still get read to, even the twelve-year-old.  She and my husband are currently reading the Harry Potter books (she has read the whole series four times through, but really wants her dad to read them).  The fourth-grader became hysterical when I suggested that she was too old for Mommy to read to her aloud at night (hoping to cut about 15 minutes from the nightly routine).  So much for that.  The first grader has mighty reading requirements from her teacher so bedtime is when we get those pages in for her log.  And the Kindergartner, well, that goes without saying.

So I am heading upstairs now amidst a flurry of fighting over who gets to go first.  We tried a chart, keeping track of whose turn it is, but that often became moot if one fell asleep while waiting for me to get to them, or one was in the shower so I read to the "wrong" kid first.  We tried saying it would be whoever was ready for bed first, but that resulted in such dangerous mad dashes up the stairs while trying to pull the siblings down by their pants, and sloppily brushed teeth, that I gave that one up too.  I am currently taking it night by night, assessing who is ready, who is most sleepy, who is most cooperative, etc., and refusing to be drawn into arguments about fairness.  Fair is each one getting what they need, not each one getting exactly the same.

I'm not sure why I don't just journal.

This year I began teaching English.  I spend my days critiquing others' writing and yet I don't know if I have any ability to write, myself.  Hence the name of my blog--Those who can't do, teach.  Hopefully this isn't true.

I keep a password protected journal on my laptop where I pour out my deepest musings, angst, and prayers without consideration for grammar, punctuation, spelling, or content.  It's not really an accurate assessment of writing ability because it's just typing as I think  and pray.  Somehow, putting it down on "paper" transfers the stress from my brain to the page, allowing me to let it go and get on with life.  I rarely go back and reread, and in fact when my last laptop crashed and my hard-drive was unrecoverable, it didn't really bother me much to lose my journal, because it's for the moment.  It's not for later.

So I am beginning this blog, this secret web log.  It's secret because I am not going to go blabbing about it, posting a link on facebook and hoping to be "discovered" and to gain thousands of followers.  I just want to challenge myself to write clearly, succinctly, and interestingly, with spelling, grammar, and all those things included.  I want to see if I can do, not just teach.

If you stumble on this post, drop me a line.  Let me know how I'm doing.