selflessness

I am daily being reminded that teaching must be a selfless profession. The things that I study, the time I spend, the energy I conjure-- it is not for me. I find that daily I am faced with decisions that affect more people than me-- kids who are depending on me, looking for me. My choice of what to risk, new doors to open are more for the benefit of those I will impart my experience to rather than simply my own life. There is something about that that keeps driving me, forcing me to keep going, even when I am so tired. When my eyes do not even stay open on their own.

I'm finding that I am more tired this semester than I think I've ever been. The light at the end of the tunnel just blends with everything else that it still speeding up. I was thinking today-- this semester started up immediately, no lull before the storm, I hit the ground running. And I'm still running.

I've found myself being able to identify in new ways with people who give out in the end. I've always held myself to high standards, always been driven to be the very best, but this semester, it seems it takes everything I have simply to keep up. I'm behind on a lot of things and am too tired to care. For the first time in my life, I don't care waht grade I get at the end of the semester as long as I pass. I've never really been in this position before and it is strange. In some ways it is frightening, in other ways, it is freeing.

But lately I've found myself pondering fears like-- what if I am this tired as a teacher. How will I ever make a difference?

I'm tired. Sometimes I wonder if I've ever been this tired in my life. The end of myself is very near and I feel my eyes doing their best to scan the horizon for what could possibly next, how things will be provided when I feel so small-- I feel as though I've given everything and yet still so much more lies ahead.

"In the end the experiment failed... but the experience of thinking a project through and trying it out was an educational success. What the teacher needs to focus on is how students need to think in order to get the results they did and what they learned as a result. In assessment and evaluation we need to penetrate the surface features of activity to get at what lies beneath it. As long as the visual arts are regarded as occasions for students to make things for the refrigerator door, they will be marginal in our schools, and if they are taught as if they were simple occasions for making things for the refrigerator door, they should be marginal."

--Elliot W. Eisner, "The Arts and the Creation of Mind"

I don't think I could have said it better-- but somehow I feel as though I've said almost exactly the same time somewhere before....