Staying Home

My teaching partner has been gone recently. She lives a busy life and between trips to the East Coast to visit family and pregnant friends and days when she's been fighting the recent flu bug, she's been out of the classroom more than she'd like. Her guilt has gotten to her and so she insisted that I stay home this morning and not come into work until after lunch. She offered it not necessarily as a favor to me, but more as a way to appease her guilt.

I couldn't say no.

But what does it say about me that I wanted to say no?

These are my "no" reasons:
1) To teach I must be in teacher mind. I've always found it difficult to shift from say, meeting mind to teacher mind or vacation mind to teacher mind. When we meet in faculty meetings before school, I am out of sync all day long with my class. My brain operates in some other dimension and shifting it back to teaching is a struggle.

This makes me think of current brain research that identifies something known as downshifting where the brain literally disengages and operates at a lower, less functional gear. When I'm not teaching, I downshift. So, an early morning without priming myself for work is a downshift and I find it hard to push the gears to function at a more precise and efficient level later in the day when I AM teaching.

2) I have my own guilt. Despite thousands of dollars spent in therapy, countless books read on the subject, and my own approaching commonsense middle age, I worry what others will think if I'm not at work. Will they know I'm sitting at home searching for puppies on the internet? Will they know I'm in my pajamas? Will they know that I've gone to the gym?

This morning, in fact, I walked to the gym just up the street and made the mistake of going before school started. Three separate families from school spotted me and waved, worry looks all over their faces because I was walking in the opposite direction of school, which leads me to...

3) I'm not a good liar. "Yes, that was me you saw walking away from school this morning," I'll have to say to one or more of the parents I saw today. "I was on my way to an appointment before I came to school." Will they know I'm lying? Will they see my ears turn red or the corners of my mouth quiver? Does it matter? Or better yet, why does it matter?

4) Letting myself relax is dangerous. Teaching is a lot like running a race. If I let myself consider how difficult it is in the middle of it, I'll struggle to finish the race. Each step will be torture. It's only January and if I let myself relax now, June will seem so much farther away than it already does.

Yesterday, on my way home, I pondered the thought of not coming back next year, of just signing up at REI for a job in retail. With full benefits even if I worked part-time, I'd probably be able to pay the mortgage and alleviate my stress. My job would be 40 hours a week and no late nights worrying about the parents who complain or the kids who are lost or the institution of education that is crumbling at my feet. No papers to grade, no phone calls home, no emails to respond to, no meetings to attend where my blood boils.

Everyone tells me I'd miss teaching and I probably would, but would I miss it so much I'd come back to it? Or would I just miss it enough to say, "Yeah, that was a good run, but now I'm on to something different?"

5) Lastly, I start to like relaxation. Even when I just get four hours of it like today, I start to think how much healthier this is not to be rushing around or answering a bazillion questions. I can workout when I want, I can spend time writing, I can bake something, I can organize my bills and my papers and even call the tax woman to set up an appointment to get my taxes done (all things I've done or tried to do this morning). This seems civilized. This seems like it's the way people should live.

I'm probably fooling myself that others live like this. Everyone is probably just as overwhelmed as I am, but it's interesting to measure this time (not at work) with that time (at work) and notice the gap between them.

Ann is overwhelmed with work these days, too. She's contemplating a change as well. Politics and incompetence are getting to her. We both got up this morning and looked at each other with a bit of resignation, but more with a look like "what shall we do about this mess?"

She, of course, had the perfect answer. We got online and looked for puppies. Then, as she headed off to school and I practiced "staying home to appease my teaching partner's guilt" I filled out a puppy application for Oh Henry! a 10 week old English Pointer. We'll find out if we're in the running in the next day or two.

A puppy, that will shake things up around here, refocus us on something other than our own choices.

Oh course, I'm trying hard not to get my hopes up. Others have applied for the same pup. Still, it's hard not to wish and dream about something other than a different job! I even hesitate to put our request on this blog...I don't want to curse us...still, it's important to dream, isn't it?