Feelin' Crappy

I spent today out of the classroom at a department chairpersons workshop. These run the gamut from really useful to mind-numbing wastes of time. Today's leaned to the useful side of the continuum. Lots of good stuff about teaching writing, approaches to literature for students who aren't good readers, problem solving with other English teacher types.

It sucked.

Not the workshop part--that was good. The sucky part was the self-evaluation that inevitably comes after, the "You reek at this job" kind of obsessive thinking that can paralyze you despite all the cool "Ooo! I should try THIS!" ideas that also pop up during such a day. Unfortunately, my obsessive mind cranks up with the reasons I ought to just hang up the teaching thing right now: You should be doing SO much more. You can't keep up with your grades. Your lesson plans are stagnant (unwritten, actually--yet another sin). How come you haven't built a Webquest? How come you don't worship at the altar of Shakespeare? How can you call yourself a LEADER when you can't even keep YOUR teaching engine running right??

Teachers are already cursed with an overdeveloped sense of obligation. That's what makes us take home piles of work, buy hundreds of dollars of supplies out of pocket, pay for lunches for hungry kids who aren't our personal offspring, and devote hours out of the classroom to coaching, sponsoring, field trips, etc. What's worse is when we start thinking "I should do MORE." Hell, to do this job right, you'd have to spend the rest of your waking hours planning, researching, and designing lessons and seamless, meaningful curricula. This would be on top of the test prep, box checking, paperwork, forms, memos, reminders, assessments, more test prep, counseling, and myriad other tasks tossed in the job description, the tasks squeezing more and more time out of the teaching day and forcing us to do the preparation and research and paper grading at home, when we should be playing with our kids, making love to our spouses, or pursuing other interests, like the church choir or gardening or, God forbid, novel writing (does it help to know that my current project is stuck in the doldrums right now?). One teacher today chirped that she and 21 of her kids tackled NaNoWriMo last month, and she and six of her kids made it. I just about tossed in the proverbial towel when I heard that. I can't keep up with my laundry, and she wrote a novel even though she grades papers for 2 hours a night. Urk.

I can see why people turn to alcohol. Too bad my drug of choice is pasta. I'll be able to rent out my butt for advertising pretty soon if I don't get it together.

Okay. Enough whining. Must do something productive. Laundry would help. Advertising butt needs clean khakis for tomorrow.