Not a Wasted Word

I struggle, when I’m stuck in a negative cycle, circling endlessly around the same stresses, to come here and write about something else. I open my computer, identify all manner of positive things I could write about (because I can and do recognize them), but I can’t seem to construct coherent thoughts about them. I am so distracted by everything that is getting me down. 

This is what makes me think that the people who portray their lives as all unicorn farts and fairy queefs on their blogs must have shit pretty good, or a fucking phenomenal attitude about the bad, because I just can’t show up and put on a happy face and write something cheery when I’m not feeling cheery at all. 

I can’t do it. 

Maybe it’s because I have to do it all day, making small talk and going through the motions with people at work, and then my husband at home. Maybe it’s because here is one of the very few places I can speak honestly about what feels hard in my life.

I know this space can feel overly negative. I hope people remember that I use this space as a kind of release valve, to equalize the pressure so I can keep laughing and chatting through the rest of my life. I do manage those social pleasantries, and quite enthusiastically I might add. 

But under the niceties other feelings swirl. The stuff you can’t talk about while you wait for you copies. The stuff that you don’t mention on the way to the lunch room. 

And here is where I come to talk about those things. So I’m sorry if this space starts to feel skewed in a particular (negative) direction. I’m sorry if I give the impression that I can’t find the good in my life. 

I assure you I can. And I do. 

I feel like I should check in, otherwise it will be a full week between posts. 

This week has thoroughly kicked my ass. I’m thankful that it’s almost over. 

My son has taken to his 4:30am wake up agains. That is not helping. 

No word from the jobs I applied for but it’s only been 1.5 weeks. 

What I did learn is that I’ll have to pack up my classroom at the end of the year and most likely won’t have one on either campus next year, because the construction on my campus has been delayed and we won’t have enough classrooms. I’ll be roaming around from room to room, teaching when and where a teacher has his or her prep. This is unfortunate news. I’m struggling with it. 

The students have spring fever and, quite frankly, are being total shits. Work is quite unpleasant right now. 

I have a new stress tick where my right eye lid twitches. It’s been happening a lot and when it does it’s crazy distracting. 

My daughter’s spring break ends today and mine is in a week. I’m really looking forward to those days off. 

I guess that is it for now. Happy Friday everyone. 

I’ve been kind of down in the dumps lately. It’s a lot of things, some of them big, some of them small, and some of them kind of confounding.

Some really big shit is going down at my daughter’s school right now. Like, really big. I’m sorry I can’t give more details, but it’s actually been written about in some smaller local publications and I don’t want anyone to read this and google it and find out where my daughter attends school. Needless to say, I’m wondering if we’re going to be able to keep my daughter there when she gets older. I’m not worried about 2nd grade, but I’m going take each year as it comes.

The stuff going on at my daughter’s school bums me out for a lot of reasons. On the one hand my feelings are self-centered; I want my daughter to be able to stay at the school and continue her education in an immersion setting. But even more troubling is the reality that while I can pull my daughter (because I have options, or at the very least know how to access the limited recourse available through the district), so many of the students there will have to stay, no matter how bad it gets. The disparity in quality of education, and access to resources, is so great; it exacerbates the already massive chasm of opportunity between those of lower socioeconomic status and those of higher.

The actions of our current executive and legislative branches are only compounding my fear of the future. The effects of their policies are going to hurt our country for generations to come. The political climate engenders a feeling of hopeless that it is hard to get out from under. I do believe it’s coloring my impressions of everything else that is happening in my life.

{But not everything is horrible. The ACA has been saved! I honestly can’t really believe that. I thought for all their hemming and hawing enough Republicans would eventually get in line. I’m so relieved that not only did they pull AHCA, but that they aren’t making a second pass to repeal and replace, at least not for a while.}

Some other stuff that has been bumming me out: my husband’s good friend recently separated from his wife. They were never married but have two kids. We see them a few times a year and my husband has drinks with his friend about once a month. He hadn’t seen him since Christmas and now he knows why… His friend is evidently distraught. They tried counseling but I guess in the end they couldn’t reconcile their differences. So now he is living in his own place. The only good news is that he’s a lawyer at a big firm and makes a lot of money so at least financially they are probably okay, or at least have options. Still, I’m sad for them and sad for their kids.

Our friends’ separation is also a reminder that we’re entering that era of lives, the one where marriages end. Most of our friends are in long term relationships. Only a few might still have families. And now a certain percentage of couples we know will get divorced. In the group of mothers that I hang out with from my daughter’s school, half of the six of us are already divorced–and our kids are only in 1st grade (to be fair, one also has a 5th grader). Every time a couple that I know and love (and think seems great together, like the ones who just separated) break up, I’ll be reminded of what a fragile thing a marriage can be. I suppose in some ways that is a good thing, as marriages are fragile in that they require a certain amount of deliberate maintenance to stay healthy and strong and it’s important to remember that. But it’s also depressing to think that this relationship I’ve worked so hard for might implode in five or ten years down the line. (Especially when my husband lies in bed for over an hour just scrolling on his phone the first Saturday after his six days away in Austin–grrrr!)

The final thing that is bumming me out is less obvious. And honestly I don’t really know what my feelings are about this, or where they are coming from.

I applied for the two high school jobs on Wednesday night. Ever since then I’ve been especially down. The thing is, both possible outcomes are depressing me! The idea of getting a new job, leaving everything I know, packing up my room and 13 years worth of resources, spending the weeks of the summer when we’re not traveling (which are few and far between) setting up a new room and preparing to teach new classes… All of that is overwhelming and upsetting. Strangely the opposite doesn’t provide much relief. Staying where I am, commuting between campuses again, teaching the same thing I’ve already taught a dozen times, dealing with the construction fiasco that will be the first half of the school year (it’s a long boring story), waiting until March to apply for high school jobs again… That bums me out as much as the alternative. I’m not quite sure why I feel equally shitty about both possible outcomes, maybe I’m just burned out, or the other stuff in my life is shadowing all the other possible bright spots. I hope that by the time I know what next year will look like I can garner a little enthusiasm for it.

I’m trying to count backwards to when I last had my period. Is this just the general malaise of the second half of my cycle. Quite possibly. I need to do a better job of tracking my cycles.

I don’t know. I’ve just been down lately. I’m trying to both accept it, and do little things in an attempt to shake it. I’m sure in a few weeks everything will seem better again.

It’s mid-March, the time of year when school districts start posting positions for the following school year. I have been so preoccupied with summer camp registration that I almost forgot. It wasn’t until last Sunday that I did my first search on EdJoin.

There are eight positions posted for high school Spanish teachers in my county (well, the county where I want to teach–I can’t currently afford to teach in San Francisco because I would have to take a $30K pay cut. Yeah, and they wonder why they struggle to retain good teachers…) Two of them are part time. Two of them are for a privately-run Charter school conglomerate that doesn’t interested me, and one is for a continuation high school, where I worry about future staffing needs for a foreign language position (the fact that no foreign languages are listed in their current course menu only augments my concern). That leaves three that I could potentially apply for, but one is even farther south than where I currently work, and that district’s salary schedule is lower, so I’d have to take a bigger cut. I’m not interested in making less money and driving farther to work. That leaves two potential positions that I can apply for, both of which would at least slightly shorten my commute, and offer a higher salary ceiling than my current employer.

Neither position is particularly exciting–neither inspires me like the one I applied for last June–but they are both full time high school Spanish positions at public high schools. That is, technically, what I’m looking for.

Yes, I’m going to apply. To both. I feel like I have to. I have considered moving to high school for so long, at this point I feel like I need to actually start applying. Maybe I will find that no high school will hire me. Maybe I will find that they will hire me, but won’t offer me the flexibility I need right now to be there for my family. Maybe the actual positions that come available won’t be as enticing as the scenario I imagine when I think of teaching at a high school.

Maybe the answer will be no in a way that helps me say yes to where I currently work.

I just finished reading The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis (author Money Ball, and The Big Short). It’s about the collaborative work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, which can be reviewed in the tome Thinking Fast and Slow (by Kahneman–Tversky died before the writing of the book). While The Undoing Project is very much about the relationship between Kahneman and Tversky, it also touches on many of their theories, which are intriguing and, to be honest, somewhat terrifying.

At its core, Kahneman and Tversky’s work describes the systematic and unavoidable  fallibility of the human mind. Evidently, we humans are pretty horrible decision makers. We unknowingly employ all these heuristics (basically, rules of thumb) when making judgements about things, and those heuristics create systematic biases in our thinking that leads us to make irrational, many times fundamentally flawed, decisions with great certainty.

Basically our minds play tricks on us that distort our perception and make it almost impossible to judge accurately. We aren’t even any good at anticipating what will make us happy, and we frequently mis-remember how happy something made us.

We also have an irrational fear of losing what we already have, so much so that we miss out on opportunities that we might otherwise value for fear of giving up something we previously gained, even if we no longer value that thing they way we once did.

Reading this book, I wonder how I can possibly trust myself to make the right decision when it comes to pursuing a new job. If I can’t be trusted to anticipate what will make me happy, or even to remember how happy (or unhappy) my job has made me, how can I decide if I should try something new?

There are so many moving parts. It’s not just about the loss of placement on a salary scale, and the subsequent pay cut. I also have benefits at my district that are grandfathered in. Surely I’d lose those even if they did grant my request for a year leave. I also lose tenure if I change districts, and it would be two years before I got it again.

If I left and wanted to come back to my old district again, I would not fall onto the same position on the salary scale, if I were lucky enough to be re-hired.

And I might not even like teaching high school. I think I’d really enjoy the older kids, and a few colleagues I’ve talked to agree that they think it would be a better fit for me, but I know many teachers who left high school for middle school and like the latter a lot more. I’ve also never dealt with the politics of being one Spanish teacher in a much bigger Foreign Language department, let alone had to make sure my curriculum was acceptable to the other Spanish teachers (if I even had any say in how or what I taught).

And what if I love teaching older students, but am bored senseless teaching the same one or two classes all day, every day, year after year? My current school is so small that I’ve taught tons of different things over the years. I wonder sometimes if that variety has been the only thing that kept me interested in teaching.

In the end I guess I’ll never know if I’m making the right decision. I might accept a high school position and then regret it straight away. Then again, I’ll almost certainly regret never trying anything different. Can I really stay at my current job for another 20+ years?

I know applying is only the first step. I know I might not even get an interview, let alone an offer. It’s just hard to move forward on something that requires so much time and effort when I feel so ambivalent. I’m so glad I found that job last year; my excitement for that position fueled a push on updating my resume and securing letters of rec that puts me in a much better position now than I would have been. Basically I just need to write my letters of introduction, and since the positions are, on the surface, the same, that letter might only need to be written once.

I know I’ve written a thousand posts about my job and if I should look for something else. So many coulda, shoulda woulda’s. I could wax philosophical about it all day. In the end I know I need to pursue these positions. Maybe I won’t get an offer, but I will recognize a better offer next year. Maybe I’ll just brush up on my interviewing skills (which have never really been used, to tell the truth). Maybe I will try something new, hate it, and know middle school is where I belong. Maybe I will try something new, love it and be so thankful that I gave it a try.

I know I’m incredibly lucky to have a job that is secure, so that I don’t need to accept a position I’m not sure of. That is an incredibly privileged place to be, and while I probably do take it for granted, I try recognize how lucky I am. My employer has, in many ways, been very accommodating and I’ve been able to make my job situation fit my family’s needs for a long time. I’m so lucky to have had that.

Updated: Michael Lewis also wrote Money Ball, not Fast Ball. 

As a chronic loser of all. the. things. I was intrigued when I first read about the Tile. This was years ago, and I was immediately curious, but I never got one because… well I’m not sure why.

Then I noticed that a friend at work had one on her lanyard because she was always losing her school keys. I keep my school keys around my neck and rarely misplace them, but was intrigued with the possibility of having one on my regular keys. I keep my keys and my wallet together with a carabiner so that I’ll never forget either one somewhere, but that doesn’t stop me from misplacing both of them around my house, like every day.

So when my mom asked for suggestions for my dad this past Christmas, I sent her a link to the Tile four pack with the note, “Two for him and two for me. Yay stocking stuffers!” You see, I inherited my propensity for losing things from my father.

My mom got the four pack and gave two to me. I put one on my keys and left the other in my nightstand drawer so I could use it to find my phone, which I spend more time looking for than my keys. And while yes, I can call my phone, the ringer is almost always off, and a lot of the time I have it on “do not disturb” so being able to call it (if I’m lucky enough that my husband is home with his phone–we don’t have a land line)  isn’t all that helpful.

And this is why I love my Tile. One of its coolest features is that if you ring your phone from your Tile it will play the song even if the ringer is off or it’s set to “do not disturb.” The app overrides both those features. So now I can always find my phone in my house, no matter what; all I have to do is double-click the circle on my Tile.

Once I have my phone, I can also find my keys. Inside the app I can ring the Tile on my keys and it will play a song too. Then I can follow the music to my wallet!

I really can’t tell you how much time I’ve saved with this simple little device. I used to spend what felt like hours scouring the house for my phone or my wallet. Now I immediately go to my nightstand, or pick up my phone, and listen for the song.

It has also helped me in my classroom, and even in my car. Sometimes I’m not sure if I threw my phone in with all the shit on my front seat. I used to have to pull over and rummage around for it, looking between the seats and even on the floor (yes, my life is a mess). Now I can press the Tile on my keys and if I hear the song, I can start driving without even finding my phone. This has prevented me from being late on quite a few mornings.

There is even GPS tracking on the Tiles, so if I really lose my keys, the app can tell me where they were last located.

The only negative to the whole set up is I need to keep bluetooth enabled on my phone all the time, otherwise my Tile can’t find it. I think this may affect battery life, but since I charge my phone in my car on the way home from work, it hasn’t been an issue. I honestly don’t know if it makes a noticeable difference on how long my phone holds a charge-I’ve never had an issue with running out of power on my phone because I can’t use it much at school while I’m teaching.

Please know that I have not been contacted by Tile in any way to write this post. I did not receive my Tiles free in exchanged for a review and the link above is not affiliated. I just really love this little item and I do believe it has improved my quality of life. I’m sure most people don’t misplace things as much as I do, but if you spend a good chunk of time looking for the same item over and over, you might want to think about getting a Tile. It really is pretty amazing.

I went to my daughter’s second trimester conference last week. She continues to do well in first grade. Organization and attention are real challenges, but she’s getting the concepts. One of the only areas where she wasn’t meeting the standard was writing. 

“Do I think she can write a How-to paper or a short story? Sure. She’s just never finished a piece of writing before. She gets too distracted.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear her teacher say this, but I was frustrated that it was the first time I was hearing about it. 

“When she doesn’t finish her writing in class can you please send it home? I’ll make sure she gets it done and brings it back to you.”

He agreed. 

Last weekend I found a cover made out of construction paper in her backpack. Inside were three pages stapled together. She had written one line. 

“We’re supposed to write a paper about cats and dogs. Our opinion about them.”

So we sat down and she wrote her paper. Here it is, my daughter’s first complete essay, an opinion piece about two popular pets. 

A translation (from Spanish):

“I like cats and dogs”

by, —–

I think cats and dogs are good. Both are furry and cute and playful. 

Cats are sleepy in the sun. They can eat a lot! They love to catch mice! They are grumpy. 

Dogs are fun. They like to play with balls. You can walk with a dog. 

I couldn’t have said it better myself. 😉