Where's My Pillow?

I have spent the past two days at a conference on Environmental Education. I have much to say, but tonight I am so tired even my typing fingers feel as if they are typing through oatmeal. My body feels as if it's moving through oatmeal. Slow and gooey, that's how I feel and there is still one more work day before a 3-day weekend.

The end of the school year is always like this. I hold on. I feel exhaustion in every breath. I neglect family and friends. I get up in the morning, pull myself through the day, and then crash at night. I thought that by having two days where I didn't work with kids would be relaxing, but instead it just added to my exhaustion.

And when I sleep, I sleep like the dead. It doesn't help that the weather is all wonky. 90 degrees on Saturday and 41 degrees yesterday. Now it's cloudy and windy and a tad warmer than yesterday, but still, that endlessly gray sky with an occasional patch of blue does little to lift my spirits or the blanket of weariness that hangs heavy on my shoulders.

One reason I signed up for this workshop was to receive 2 credits toward renewing my teaching certificate. The 2 credits require me to write a paper and right now, that's the last thing I want on my plate. Luckily, the "teacher" isn't too pushy about when the paper is due or the length the so-called paper needs to be. "A unit plan," he said, but there was no criteria, no specified requirements, no instructions beyond that.

I can BS with the best of them. I can pull a fantastic lesson plan out of my ass in no time, but the problem is that I have very little time and not so much motivation. This is my last year of teaching and while I'm trying to maintain my certification for another 5 years, I'm doing so only as a safety net in case I need to sign up as a substitute teacher to pay my portion of the bills.

But I'm kind of done with teaching and being in this workshop solidified my decision to leave. The presenter is an award-winning environmentalist with schools all around the world. He is an anthropologist by training, but has spent his life setting up environmental programs in Thailand, Bali, and the Queen Charlotte Islands (just to name a few). He was a walking factoid, spewing out statistics and dilemmas like a computer.

While some of his information was new, most of it I was familiar with since I've spent a lot of my career studying the implications of human impact on the planet. Most of the other teachers were quite young and many of them hadn't heard nor had they played many of the games the presenter shared with us. It felt simplistic in many ways until I realized that what we do in our classroom is not the norm for most classrooms around the state or even in the country.

So, while I didn't feel stretched in terms of my own learning, I did feel proud that the kind of work I've been doing is the kind of work that needs to be done in classrooms all around the world. Not to sound too arrogant, I realized that I was good at the work I've been doing for over 20 years and now it was time to pass the torch to others who have more energy than I seem to be able to muster these days.

There have been times on this journey to leave teaching when I've felt a twinge of regret. "Oh maybe I am good at this and should just keep going..." but today it felt great to leave knowing I was a good teacher. I'm not sure why it offered me so much peace, but today, while we mucked around in a stream and talked about the properties of willow trees, I said to myself, "Wow, I don't have to retain all this information and carry it back to my classroom to create a lesson. I can just revel in the knowledge and choose to live my own life differently, but the burden/responsibility of teaching others now falls to these young people." Right there in that stream I could feel the weight of my 22 year teaching burden fall off my shoulders.

Hey, maybe that's why I'm so tired...I've been carrying quite a load for quite some time. Not as long as others, but certainly longer than most and even in my weariness, I felt rather proud today to be at the end of something pretty astonishing.

Still, I have to write a "unit plan" as well as wrap up the last year of my career, which includes so many "last tasks" I can hardly think straight let alone keep my head from finding the nearest pillow and sleeping for 20 hours.