What's Next?

As hard as it is to get up before the sun comes up, many mornings I am blessed with a beautiful sunrise along Highway 481.




I've grown to love the 25 minute commute, at least most days. It's the perfect amount of time to get my thoughts together in the morning, to run through whatever last minute tasks I need to do when I get to my classroom, and to get in a few good songs to set the mood for the day. On the way home, it's enough time to make sense of the day and think about things less immediate than running copies and preparing for a lesson. Over the past few days, I've used that time to seriously think about something I wasn't even considering a month or two ago: where I'll be next year.

If you had asked me in December, and maybe even just last month in January, I would have surely said that I"ll be right back here for the 2012 - 2013 school year. I've said a million times how much I love the women I work with, and that even though my job is incredibly difficult, I couldn't imagine being anywhere else. And for right now, that is still the case. I still know that this is exactly where God intended me to be...right now. But I find myself thinking more and more about whether I can do another year of this.

By "this", I mean all of the extra crap our district and the state make us do. Submitting weekly lesson plans. Submitting plans for our lesson plans. Documentation of how we are implementing this and that in our classrooms. Testing our kids every other week. Replacing our planning periods with meeting after meeting. All the while telling us how bad we are at our jobs. And that our school is unsafe. And that nothing good is happening in our classrooms. It gets old very quickly.

There's not much more to say right now. Or maybe there's just entirely too much to say, so I'll stop before I get going. Nothing is set in stone yet, either way. I've got a lot of soul-searching to do.