Teacher of the Year

Yup. I interviewed today. I don't know how I did, but I answered from the cuff and I didn't care, if I made it past district or not.

Four years ago I was on a growth plan at another school. The big bowl of suck stew was even steamoer because I had gone from being thought of as this great teacher to an insecure, blithering, nose bleeder with no boundaries. My fuck you was totally broke.

What I know now is that it was a person's opinion of me. They made it hard to do my job. They put me down, bullied, even sabotaged. I did not have the resources I needed to meet their expectations. A terrible time yoked with my divorce, hateful, vindictive in laws and a new relationship had me looking for rock real estate cause i was crawlin'. My beautiful four kids and their well being as well as wondering if I was setting them up for psychological care took up the forefront.

What I learned was that, opinions can be important, but more important is what YOU think, especially when the opinions are born from malice or fear or ineptitude. Yeah. That's pretty elementary, but I AM a well establiahed slow-ass  learner. It's ridiculously easy to go along with someone saying you suck, when you already think so.

I took this lesson to my kids_and by kids I mean, my students. I got what it felt like to have unmet needs and impossible expectations placed on me. I look at my kids now with these well earned eyes. I believe that it was those eyes that put me in an interview for Teacher of the Year and the same ones that help me see that it's not that big a deal.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm a dork...

I wrote a reply to my ex. I did it in bullet points. Yep, since he is brain injured  I always did this thing where I try to make my comms readable for him or to be read to him since his family often writes his texts and emails. Even when I'm finally fed up with taking the high road and fire off the inevitable "I've had a ration of your BS this last year, leave. me. alone" email, Leave it to me to organize it by number with boldfaced keywords. *blink blink* We have had this ridiculously acrimonious divorce. Cop cars are kicked and pummeled. Drivebys ensue. Home gets raided by inlaws. Money is stolen. Accusations involving mental health , sexual appetites general levels of integrity and character, all get hurled like wads of soggy toilet paper And I'm still putting his email in bullet points for readability. Laughing... OMIGOSH.. I'm a dork.
Read more

Insides and outsides

He texted in the middle of night. I heard it when it came in at two am since I'm not sleeping, but I tried to wait to answer. I wanted to answer fairly and lovingly and I didn't want him worrying about me not sleeping. I know he is hurting. My insides are made of strands of fine glass right now. No matter how careful I am, I can feel the shards dig into my flesh. If I startle from a nightmare or a memory of the out of the blue kisses he would place on my hand in the middle of a city sidewalk or a restaurant things like this dislodge and slam into the clear, merciless material scaffolding my middle and creating precise hairfine slices so clean my organs don't bleed, initially.  Songs, food, smells, places I drive past, the goddamn police now seemingly rolling all over the city in what now feel like daily personal police escorts... the bed we shared...fuck... I pretty much stay in a perpetual hemmorrhage. Last night I had to tell the kids. They only knew us to be happy. My
Read more

Upside Downside

After the evaluation, Stoic sat down with me in the garden of the rehab center and told me he wanted me out of the house in four months and that he was giving his Power of Attorney to his sister, but he didn't know when. Come to find out he had been to an attorney's office the Friday before with both his mother and his sister. So actually, he DID know, he was just lying.  I remember looking down at the bricks paving the garden path. I didn't say anything at the time other than I understood why he felt the way he did. I looked up and asked him if he wanted me to bring anything the next time I came to visit, knowing I probably wouldn't be visiting anymore. I noted the heavy, cold mass growing in my belly and moving slowly  up to the area just behind my breast bone.  The adrenalin from the familiar, yet suddenly foreign, almost surprising realization that all THIS was really about to happen made the breath passing up my windpipe almost icy. He stood up and then, I did, p
Read more