Tuesday Slice: Settling in

 

I am six months into the 20-21 school year, on a new-but-not-new-to-me campus...and I think I'm settling in, as much as one can in this alternate universe of teaching under pandemic conditions.

If you haven't followed my journey to my current job, here is a summary:  my children went to our neighborhood elementary while I worked as an ARD facilitator (translation: running IEP meetings) for our district's DAEP (secondary disciplinary campus) for eleven years.  I was surplussed from that job during budget cutbacks just a few weeks after I signed up for grad school--Library Science.  Two weeks later, as my youngest was getting ready to "graduate" fifth grade and move on to middle school, I was hired as a resource teacher at the elementary campus.  I taught there for three years as I completed my classes and practicum, and then got hired as librarian for another campus.

That was seven and a half years ago.  Last May, the librarian at our neighborhood school retired.  After a lot of soul-searching, I left a position in which I was very happy, and moved to my neighborhood school.  It was a big change:  high SES to Title I, a campus of over a thousand students to one with five hundred.  Newish, modern, spacious school to a building built in the seventies.

(I think you get the picture, yes?)

I have hall duty each morning and afternoon, outside of the library doors.  I am grateful, because it gives me an opportunity to say hello to my new-to-me students.  I don't know all of their names yet, but they know mine now.  A few are starting to pause on their way to class to talk about what they're reading now, what they are going to read next.  I'm hearing reports from teachers that their classes look forward to their library day, even though most of the meetings occur online.  My new-to-me assistant and I are getting into a groove, sharing responsibilities for running the library.  There's still a lot of work to be done (I dream of remodeling the space a bit!).  But a wise library professor once told me that if I ever finished my to-do list in the library, I was doing something wrong.

Last May, I sat in front of the school on a Sunday afternoon, exploring my feelings about returning and the changes it would bring.  Eight months later, I'm looking at the next eight years, and thinking about what I can accomplish on this campus.  I'm settling in.

Tuesday Slice: It's not working

It's either my mouse or the computer that's failing.  Occam's Razor would say it's the mouse, but the cable connecting it to the computer is buried under a pile of papers, the connection hidden behind a screen.  It would require at least an hour to dig it out, and I've procrastinated doing so.  

Looking at this problem from a broader perspective...procrastination is my modus operandi.  I will put up with inconvenience (usually of my own making) for quite awhile before taking action.  Sometimes procrastination works in my favor; I've written my best academic papers at deadline, for example.  Sometimes it makes a problem worse, like growing piles of clutter, unfinished craft projects, and a mouse/ computer that refuses to highlight, open dropdown menu items, or opens multiple tabs, even on its slowest settings.  I wait until the problem severely impacts my daily living, and then employ the pound of cure instead of the ounce of prevention.

But I've chosen "results" as my one little word this year.  So today I will spend an hour after work excavating that pile of paper (hopefully sending most of it to the recycle bin), free the cable and unplug the mouse, and plug in the dongle for the wireless mouse my husband gave me for Christmas.  Hmmm, that means I won't have to worry about the cable being buried again.... 

Tuesday Slice: A blanket of white

 

The meteorologists were cautiously talking about snow a week ago, hinting at the chance of seeing the white stuff here in the Austin area, but leaning more towards accumulation in the Hill Country with a cold, wet mix of rain and snow closer to the city.

Two days out, they said it was looking more promising.  Maybe an inch or two, if we were lucky.

One day out, and one meteorologist was going big with a chance of eight inches.

I woke up before the alarm on Sunday to a clap of thunder for the second time this season.  Thunder always surprises me in winter; I associate that sound with the hot, steamy days of summer.  But there was no mistaking the boom, and the following deluge of rain.  Ah, well, wintry mix it is, I guessed.

Then it happened.  Halfway through "CBS Sunday Morning", I noticed the sound of rain had stopped.  I turned to the window to see big, fat white flakes falling outside.  Melting as soon as they hit the drenched ground.  Still skeptical, I turned back toward the television.

The snow kept falling...and falling.  Soon it WAS sticking.  When it stopped at five pm, we had a beautiful four inches of the white stuff blanketing our backyard.  For a few hours there was no pandemic, no politics...just the silent snow falling, the hush it brought to the landscape, the sight of children building snowmen in the park.

Our snow day was fleeting, however.  By four in the afternoon on Monday, it was almost gone, save for the snowmelt now filling the drainage creekbed.  Ah, well...it was beautiful, if just for the day.

Tuesday Slice: Morning pages and my 2021 OLW

 

Inspired by a friend who is a new Slicer but a practiced writer, I have begun writing morning pages. I can't even find my unread copy of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, but I know that morning pages are one of the recommended practices.  I ordered a dot grid notebook from Erin Condren, the one where you could put your "one word" on the cover and have it repeated over and over in the middle center, and then promptly covered that up with a cute winter cover. Maybe that's a Freudian slip, my avoidance of self-accountability and reflection--my focus of the year.

I found the perfect poster for my OLW on Canva, tweaked it a bit for my tastes, and printed it out to guide me while I set my goals and intentions for 2021.  I am allllll about the planning, but rarely stop to reflect and gauge results.

I have a hard time being accountable to myself.  And when I was staring at my goals pages in a workbook I use for such, I realized that I'd been writing the same goals for years...without results.  I was missing concrete action plans, the kind of SMART goals I used to write for my students' IEPs (not that I really miss doing that--I miss the students, but not the IEP paperwork).  I have been using my planners as to-do lists with just a peek now and then at my goals for maybe the first two months of the year.  Then December comes round with a look back...and no results to speak of.

I have talked about this before, I know.  Maybe even written a Slice about it.  I have read books about it, had support readily available, and still not followed through.  Maybe writing about it in morning pages will push me forward, if I take off the cutesy cover and let that one little word imprint itself on my mind.