I finally have a few minutes to collect my thoughts on how things are going. … why not make it public?
Student teaching has been awesome. Daunting. Intimidating. Exhausting. Confusing. Rewarding. Affirming. … lots of things. If I weren’t also going to school and having to keep on top of tasks and classes, it would be far more positive. I’d have way more energy and let’s face it, elementary school teachers need all the energy they can eek out.
Week one I was fired up. I had my fruit mason jar plan, I had healthy snacks that kept my energy mostly up most of the day … but lately I’m just tossing what I can root out of my pantry like a half-conscious feral raccoon most mornings into my lunch box.
I’m also trying to solo parent. This is a whole effort in futility on it’s own. Relying on my high school senior to get out of bed in time for me to be on time for work has proven incredibly frustrating. Between being over tired and over-hormoned last week, I finally found my last wit. I arrived at my wit’s end when my child decided to make a bathroom stop after we were already five minutes late to leave the house. I wont go into detail, but it was not a drop and run kind of bathroom stop.
I was livid. This shit is not ok. I had to have what ended up being the second lecture given in 24 hours and that made me the most upset.
“This is not how I want our time spent together to go. This is not fun for me. I do not want the only interaction before you go off to school in the morning to be your mom harping on you to wake up with enough time to drop a deuce in the morning and still be on time for life!!”
I told him what needed to change and it will all be in effect Monday morning. I drove to work crying because some days you have to be the mean mom. He got the message. We did the goodbye/i love you routine despite being frustrated and mad, but I still had to go to work feeling like the mean guy. Nothing needed to go differently. It was all acceptable and reasonable, but I had to get through feeling all of my feelings about it before showing up to support kids who would also have the same brain challenges. But I had to encourage, support, and plan for them. I couldn’t rain down my Mom fury like I had to with the 17 year old.
This emotional stress and obligation is heavy. I feel like Moms are the only ones that truly get it. It isn’t fair and that’s just how it is.
I’ve taught a few lessons by now. I’ve also had my first observation for my program and after one failed recording/lesson and over 3 hours of wasted time trying to manage the tech to get my second video uploaded, I finally got it all turned in. My clinical supervisor gave me really positive feedback. It went super well once it all finally made it to where it needed to be. I had a small amount of confidence to carry me into my first math lesson.
Good lord did that go down like a flaming bag of rocks. My mentor teacher is incredibly gracious and saved me and the kids from math disaster by jumping in. She has tried to tell me not to feel bad about it and it wasn’t as bad as I thought, but she was just being her positive and supportive super self.
I had a grown up moment of pushing through after that lesson, though. Not to get all psycho babble, but normally those kinds of disappointment/failure/catastrophe would bring me to a halt. I would throw my hands up and completely annihilate myself mentally. But instead I gave myself grace. This was my first ever math lesson. I am not a number-savvy math wiz. I have not led these kids through five months of math lessons before this one. I am not a master of decimals and place values, let alone dividing them. I did my best. There was lots of room for growth because I’m still learning how to do this. The kids were incredibly kind about it and I didn’t cry in front of them! yay!
I’m out here doing my best. This weekend brought about a silly challenge and opportunity for a conversation with a “family” member on social media. They are only related by marriage, and at that they are the third one to be married to this actual relative and we are not close. I have always been respectful, but distant. This person decided to post a meme of an anti trans sentiment. Something about people are born who they are and so that is who they will always be.
Genuinely curious as to the motivation, I simply asked respectfully what the goal of sharing it was. They responded that it was “just a joke” and I compared the sentiment in the “joke” to being born an asshole. Just because you are born an asshole doesn’t mean you have to stay an asshole. People can change. This led to an entertaining post-off, if you will, with a friend of hers, the person who posted, and myself. I was simply trying to make points while they defended their anti-trans comments including, but not limited to, “they need to stick to their own kind” and “those people cut up children who grow up to commit suicide”.
Do I enjoy arguing? Yes. Does anyone actually change another person’s mind? Not yet.
What I find interesting about people who try and defend this thinking is the minute you point out that what they are saying is actually damaging, then all of a sudden it’s an attack. Asking for someone to look at the humanity instead of whether or not they agree with the community is in no way an attack.
It ended in my blocking them to save my mental bandwidth for things that are actually valuable for my time. I find it incredibly frustrating when people use unfounded arguments and rhetoric to back up their prejudices. Why is a conversation about a disagreement viewed as an “attack” and shoving morals down someone’s throat, but we must have have flags in our classrooms and pray to Jesus to be considered worthy of civil rights?
I am always left feeling completely disillusioned and sad about the state of our country after such encounters. As a parent of 2 LGBTQ+ kids, I have an obligation to challenge people about their hate. Until we accept people for being human first and foremost, things are never going to be equal. One simple formula for that is to replace the person you are hating and trying to take the right to medicine and civil safety away from and replace them with yourself or your child. Are you still in favor of that law? Whether or not you would, you wouldn’t, you feel, you love, you pray- NONE OF THAT is taken into account. Simply replace that person with yourself or your mother or child. Would you still say that person does not deserve basic rights, health care, school safety, government protections? What does that tell you about your cause?
No one is threatening to take the voting, medical, marriage, civil rights away from Trump supporters or Senators. The argument is one side wants to remove rights, the other is asking for protections. Not to take anything away.
Blech. Enough. It feels like a circle of despair.
Sarcasmica 