A Year of Teaching Adventurously

Home From The War l Sam Heyman l Spoken Word

I knew when I started this blog that there was a relatively high chance that things would go this way. Notice I didn’t say “end up”—I’m not finished, not by a long shot.

October—and, wow, most of November—has gone by with nary an update to this blog, and although I know no one is depending on this blog for their livelihood or anything like that, I do feel some apology is in order. It isn’t that I haven’t had time to write. (It’s rarely a matter of time with writers.) For me, it’s been a situation, or a string of situations, where I’ve felt that I haven’t lived up to my goals, my idealized identity as the Mindful Mentor. I’ve continued to teach and mentor my students, but in a lot of ways I’ve let my personal goals fall by the wayside, and I feel like this has impacted my teaching practice in a couple ways.

For one, although I feel like I’m handling my largest (Gateway) teaching load to date with relative cool headedness, the small things seem to be falling off. I’ve moved from trying to find opportunities to work harder to figuring out shortcuts, ways to get away with putting in as little advance effort as possible. I’ve become less adventurous, and in small ways, less effective.

That said, there are things that I have felt good about. I have a strong rapport with my students. I get to laugh with them on a regular basis. I’ve been giving them regular tests and quizzes and they’re doing pretty well on them (and not because they’re easy). I’m gradually figuring out how to guide students through the essay writing process without too much nitpicking, and without outright telling them what to write. We’re almost to the end of our second quarter and we haven’t stopped updating character sheets (though occasionally there have been weeks where I have forgotten and have had to retrace steps later). And despite being initially wary of the workload associated with five regular Gateway students, it has been much more manageable than when I had four Gateway students last year because I only have three grade levels to work and plan within.

Thanksgiving break was much needed, but I don’t feel like I’m dragging myself to the finish line. Or I suppose I can say, I don’t plan on having to drag myself to the finish line. I’m making shifts in my health and my habits to bring me closer to the track I was on at the beginning of the semester. Just like how I started out the semester, and this journey as a whole, I want to set concrete, measurable goals for myself that will help me make progress.

Physically, I want to get back in shape and stop neglecting my physical health. My starter goal will be to go to the gym on my own for an hour-long workout at least once a week. Workouts with other people are also on the agenda, but I need to start by being my own motivator.

Mentally, I need to restart my meditation routine. I’ve been getting better about waking up early enough to get to work in time to meditate, but for whatever reason, I’ve kept myself from doing it recently. 10 minutes daily (Monday-Friday) is my minimum goal, and once I have that down, I’ll bump it back up to 20 minutes.

Interpersonally, I want to reach out to my family more, especially my extended family that doesn’t live near me. I am blessed to have three living grandparents, and a gallery of wonderful aunts and uncles, but I don’t feel like I share enough of myself with them, or check in with them often enough. Although I don’t think setting a goal of calling each one of my extended relatives once a week is realistic, I can set a goal of contacting three family members a week, with the goal of getting to everyone on my list by the end of the month.

Personally, I want to pick up my reading and writing habits again, including but not limited to what I do for this blog. Adventure 1 was productive—more productive than anticipated in some respects—but Adventure 2 has had its issues. 30 minutes of nightly reading with planned communication with writing friends about my novel seems like a fair goal at the moment. My current reading goal is to finish reading The Hobbit before the end of the semester, so I’ll need to pick up the pace.

Professionally, the main thing I need under control is my regularity with Notes Home and submitting grades. I write Notes Home every week, but whereas I used to write them on Fridays and Sundays fairly consistently, I’ve recently struggled to meet this standard, finishing them over the course of the work week. Before this evening (Sunday 6pm), I have a goal to be completely caught up with my Notes Home backlog so I feel good going into next week. I also plan on being as up to date with grades as I can be by Sunday evening (with only recent quizzes/tests that are on my desk being left for Monday morning.)

And lastly, at the very least, I will publish a blog post next weekend checking in on these goals, but if I can muster up the energy, I will also write a blog post during the work week as well. I want to be excited to share my progress with you all, not ashamed that I’ve come up short. It’s okay to not be all the way there yet, but I can’t gripe about it if I don’t try.

Life will pass through, keep being you.

“I want to be better than I was, better than I am.”

I say these words to myself from time to time, generally after I am reminded of something I’m ashamed of, or when I feel myself slipping into bad habits. It’s a mantra, almost a compulsion, that I hold with me. It started out as something shorter, though:

“I want to get better.”

These words, which some might recognize as lyrics from a certain Bleachers song, sum up a lot of how I used to think of myself and my struggles, especially when I was struggling. It bears a connotation of recovery, as if my dysfunction were an illness I was trying to correct, and this isn’t exactly the case. I don’t want to get better, I want to be better. I want to do better. And I can.

Another oft-used phrase: “I don’t know what I’m doing—I’m trying, but I’m failing.” This one crops up whenever I make even the smallest mistake. Maybe I didn’t lock my house door when I left for work. Maybe I stayed in bed too long. It doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny—am I trying? Is missing the mark the same as failing?—but it doesn’t have to. It’s a reaction to a feeling more than anything, and when the feeling takes hold, the voice that emerges takes on a life of its own.

This negative voice doesn’t always come to the surface, and lately, it hasn’t been dominant. But the positive voice that started me out on this project hasn’t always been in play, either.

“Life will pass through, keep being you.” That was the motto I gave the Mindful Mentor for my first Adventure, and really, though it is addressed to you, the audience, it is something I want to remind myself of, each time I make a misstep, each time I come up short. Life has been passing through, and when it comes to being me, maintaining my habits and continuing to work toward my goals, I haven’t exactly stopped, but I don’t think I’ve been my best.

I think something that mindfulness is teaching me is being accepting of who I am, in each individual moment. I’m allowed to want more for myself, to want more out of myself, but I can also accept what I’m able to give on a given day. Some days, it’s hard to get out of bed. I still do it, but maybe I don’t give myself enough time after getting up to get to work early, meditate and prepare for the day’s challenges. Maybe I have only enough to get to work and get settled before the first (proverbial) bell. And on those days, maybe that is my best.

It doesn’t stop me from being discontented, from being unsatisfied with myself and my actions. Being mindful doesn’t mean giving mediocrity a pass. To me, being mindful means taking stock of my thoughts and feelings, and deciding for myself which of those thoughts and feelings, if any, has the power to shape how my day goes. I’m not rejecting negativity, I’m giving all things their due consideration. And if I’ve truly done my job, then I should come out ahead more often than not.

Adventure 2 began last week, and my students set new goals for the quarter. I had each of them create documents meant to track their regular engagement with these goals, and we’ll generally be checking them at the beginning and the end of each week. I want to write about what I settled on when it comes to Discipline and Openness, because there are still some things I want to finish hashing out, but for now I just want to set an intention for my week.

This week, I want to be better than I was last week, with regards to my habits. I didn’t do any nightly reading and I completely dropped the ball on meditation. Not only that, but I didn’t write any blog posts. I did do a decent job with teaching and planning last week, but it was a shorter span of days to work with, and in any case, I can’t rest on my laurels.

It might be slow at first, but I don’t want to be all or nothing with my habits. I want to do things every day, but I know sometimes I will miss the mark. I need to be okay with missing and trying harder the next day. Today counts, and tomorrow will count too.

Well, this sure has been a week.

After a rocky start, I think I managed to make it through a solid week of teaching, planning and grading, only missing out on some meditating toward the end and some nightly reading (I’m still choosing what book to revisit--Vote now on your phones!). My adventurers are about to finish Adventure 1 and I have a few things to prepare for to make sure we tie things up nicely--and set ourselves up for even better adventuring going forward!

Some main happenings this week--I went through Unit 0 with The Nutritious Napper and The Bodacious Bookworm. Given I wasn’t actually there to teach the Guided Notes on SuperBetter, the unit felt a little anemic by comparison to how it seemed the first time around. I don’t necessarily want it to be longer, but I might choose a different chapter to read from Mindset, or maybe pair the Passage Response Reflection with a different text entirely the next time I teach it.

The Relentless Wordsmith and I worked through a few selections from The Canterbury Tales, and I think having a way of taking notes while we read is going to be important in general. We’ve taken notes on nearly everything we’ve read and it’s helped him to do better on his homework, so I shouldn’t let that stuff slide. The Studious Scholar and I are reading Death of a Salesman, which I actually haven’t read until now (I remember reading All My Sons in college, which is not the same thing.) Meanwhile, the Henotic Health Advisor started writing an original short story involving anthropomorphic rodents and interspecies warfare! All in all, our last few lessons seem to be writing themselves.

Less clear is where things are going in Quarter 2. For our next Adventure, I have a few goals for what I want to accomplish. The first goal is mechanical, and also tied to pacing. I want to make sure that, at least one day a week, my students get some time to revise earlier work. This means I have to give more feedback overall, but the main purpose behind this, gamefully speaking, is to give them more opportunities to earn points to Openness and Discipline. These two traits, along with Bravery, have been lacking much purpose in the current design of my teaching and learning game. They are, like the main attributes, accumulative in nature, but rather than representing a skill that can be improved upon, they are more like badges of honor, marks of going above and beyond with assignments and responding to feedback. Therefore, as I’ve discussed with my students already, in the next Adventure, Openness, Discipline and Bravery will become currency to be spent on bonuses relating to homework, quizzes and other things I’m still working out.

In order to make this work, I need to be more specific and consistent with what I award these points for. Bravery has been under utilized thus far, and I haven’t worked out exactly what I should qualify as a Brave act. The main candidate I have in mind has to do with the less-assisted parts of the writing process. If students spend time out of class doing a substantial amount of writing, venturing into the unknown, I can reward them not just with positive sub-deadline grades, but Bravery. In hindsight, I could have given the Relentless Wordsmith quite a bit of Bravery for his ability to maintain a consistent pace during his Beowulf essay writing process. On the other hand, the Studious Scholar may have missed out on Bravery but might have been incentivized to get more of his work done in a timely manner if the reward for accumulating Bravery was good enough. Lots of things to figure out, but I’ve got time.

Another goal I have for Adventure 2 is to do something interesting with the Writing Prompt routine I have in place. At first Weekly Goals and Narrative Reflections were the name of the game and generally went fine, but I feel like as time has gone on the prompts have become repetitive and as a result, uninspiring. To increase opportunities for creative expression (and thus Magic gains) I want to make my writing prompts more varied and demanding. Granted, we will still probably keep them to about 7 minutes in length, so I don’t want them to be too elaborate. It will be a delicate balance to strike.

There’s still one more week remaining in Adventure 1, and I’m determined to finish things strong--and maintain some momentum as we move into Adventure 2! I’ll lay out my plan of attack on Sunday.

Life will pass through, keep being you.

Shana Tova, Good Yontif and Happy Monday to all the Goyim in the audience - It’s time to talk about the week that was, the week that is and the way I’m feeling heading into the (Jewish) New Year!

Let’s start with last week. Last week, as I wrote previously, I did have a sick day, which set me back a good chunk of hours with my students. However, I feel like on the whole the week went well. I handled my new student additions relatively well, and I think I’m going to enjoy going back through Unit 0 with them.

Speaking of new students, welcome The Nutritious Napper and the Bodacious Bookwork to the fold! These two adventurers took up their mantles on Thursday and began their first Adventure today, without me, due to Rosh Hashanah Shanah-negans.

As for the week that is, well, it’s already in progress. I was not in school today because I performed in my synagogue’s choir during Rosh Hashanah services. The High Holy Days have always been an interesting time for me. For many Jews, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur can be sobering reminders of a year’s trials and tribulations, the priorities that have drifted and the ways in which we have not measured up. The past few years, for me, the September-October season has generally brought some form of realignment; Last year I had quit my first big-boy teacher job to preserve my own integrity and to find a better path; three years before that, I discovered SuperBetter, sending me off on a journey toward growth and self-discovery.

The point is, this time of year isn’t always uplifting, but it generally presents an opportunity for change -- and that’s exactly what I’ve been needing. As the general tone of my past few posts might have indicated, I’ve been feeling less than exemplary lately, and the winds in the sails of my year of teaching adventurously have entered a waning period. However, as I learned over the summer, the main stressors I have when it comes to teaching are not found in the teaching itself, but in the preparation. When I’m not prepared, and more importantly, when I’m intimidated by the process of preparation, my anxiety flares up. In those moments, it doesn’t really matter how much mindfulness meditation I practice, or how much regular reading I do (though I did finish What If It’s Us this weekend, which felt good). The issue I need to address first is just doing the dang thing.

Today, that’s what I resolved to do, and it came after a very close call. As I mentioned, I did not teach today, but I did write my sub plans and the quizzes some of my students had to complete. However, the trouble was, I wrote all of those sub plans and each of those quizzes... today. This morning, in fact.

I could make excuses, I could go into detail about my emotional state on Sunday, or the social time I had on Saturday, but really, what happened was due to an accumulation of factors, weeks in the making. The simple fact is, my Fridays have not been as productive as they’ve needed to be, and it has put a lot of pressure on my Sundays. It’s okay to enjoy a day off, but eventually, something’s gotta give, and as I’ve learned, when I leave everything to Sunday, it sometimes just doesn’t happen. I roll in early on a Monday, frazzled and scrambling to get something ready for the day--and that is my least favorite way to start a Monday. I’ve told myself I want to make my Friday’s useful and productive, but try as I have, my best laid Friday morning plans have so far gone awry.

I need to change this particular part of my habits, so I can enjoy my Friday evenings and Saturdays in good conscience. I need to do this so I can avoid feeling the way that I felt this morning. At 7:30am, I was awake in bed, paralyzed with fear-based lethargy. It took a serious effort to get out of bed, and once I did, the reality of how much I had to do set in. “I don’t have enough time. I can’t do this. Oh god, what if I can’t do this?” I alternately catastrophised aloud and typed out my plans. I was getting picked up at 8:15 for choir. The plans needed to be in by 9, and if I left at 8:15 there was no way I’d finish by then, even if I brought my laptop. I told my dad that I’d drive separately, almost sputtering with panic, and hustled back into my house to finish the job. And I did finish the job, more than an hour later, just in time to head to choir and make it to my seat five minutes before the service began.

When I saw my dad, he was in good spirits, happy that I had made it. As for me, I was in tears, reeling from the fact that I almost didn’t. Upset with myself for putting my job at risk, frustrated that I hadn’t put forth enough effort on the front end to prevent this kind of thing from happening. My dad did what he could to get me in better spirits and to smile through the tears. My choir neighbor grabbed me some napkins to use as tissues. We sang our songs, chanted our prayers and ushered in the new year.

The day ended up being a good one. I knocked out my outstanding Notes Home in one fell swoop before my single Monday tutoring client, and I did a fair amount of the legwork to make grading for the past few weeks a breeze. Now that I’m getting to process my experiences in words, I’m feeling a lot better about how things are going and how they should continue to go this week, if I stay vigilant, and stop shirking my responsibilities. My days may be longer, but they won’t feel long if I’m more prepared and can get the drop on them.

Now it’s time to talk goals.

This week I will continue to do 10-20 minutes of meditation a day (today I watched two videos on Headspace in lieu of a formal meditation, but I will meditate tomorrow morning.), I will begin another book (I’m between Turtles All The Way Down by John Green or All The Birds In The Sky by Charlie Jane Anders currently) and I will do my planning, grading and notes home on a nightly basis.

Tomorrow might be a long day, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. It’s the first new day of a sweet new year.

Life will pass through, keep being you.

I used to like sick days.

Mostly, I think, because a lot of the sick days I’ve taken as an adult have been mental health days. The reality of the work I do is that it pays okay, and I enjoy doing it, but when I miss a day, or am otherwise a day short, I really feel it. This week started out pretty well, and my first day with my new adventurers went well, but last night I tossed and turned dealing with a sore throat. It didn’t end up amounting to much—a strep test at the Minute Clinic yielded a negative result and I left the pharmacy with ibuprofen and some numbing cough drops—but to be safe, I stayed home from work. Now I’m looking ahead to Thursday, usually a brief, laid-back affair, and I feel, well, anxious. I have quizzes to write. It’s only my second day with two of my students and we’re about to kick off Unit 0, and there’s a part of me that’s worried that it’s not going to go well.

The thing is, there’s a lot of signs that things will be fine. I’ve gone through this process smoothly already this year, and I know I can pull it off again. I just need to let myself enjoy the process, get back in there, and finish the week strong.

I’ve been reading again, and on the days I’ve been teaching, I’ve managed to get my meditation time in, which has felt good. Taking time during the day to just breathe, to pause and let my mind focus on one thing at a time, has been helpful, and I plan to use it to get me to the finish line. Today may have been hard, and it may feel like I’ve been set back, but I know that momentary frustration can’t beat the Mindful Mentor so easily.

For tomorrow, I have two adventurers to induct into my system, and three quizzes to administer to my remaining adventurers. The Relentless Wordsmith has been reading the Canterbury Tales and has learned about the Middle Ages. The Studious Scholar spent some time reading Puritan poetry, and The Henotic Health Advisor—many adjectives beginning with H have cycled in and out of his title—has been reading some short stories from the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Truman Capote. The quizzes I need to write for them are not necessarily going to be punishing in difficulty, but they should cover a decent breadth of information.

The main objective of tomorrow’s introductory lesson is to introduce them to their character sheets and to have them add one more paragraph to their Intro to Me letters, which they should have completed while I was gone. We’ll discuss their letters and brainstorm their Personal Pursuits and Growth Goals for the last part of this Adventure, and I’ll be able to document our discussions here later this week.

I know I’m capable, and I’m not going to let a day off and Thursday jitters keep me from taking on my challenges with gusto.

I’ll update you on how it all goes. Until then, life will pass through, keep being you.

It’s been an interesting set of weeks, and it’s time to break down some of what’s been going on. The nature of my mental health challenges can make it difficult for me to maintain certain habits, and although most of this year has gone smoothly on that front, I haven’t been free from the struggles I have historically dealt with. Last week, I started things out coming from a weekend where I felt less than centered, and although I was able to get back in the medication saddle, it was definitely a process. Navigating through that process made it difficult for me to find motivation to return to my blogging desk, and although I found time to meditate and read to some extent, as I mentioned to my students in my Hero’s Log entry this week, I felt “less centered.”

In an effort to re-center myself, I’m going to lay out the challenges that lie ahead of me this week, and the approach I intend to take with them. I have two new students who are being added to my Gateway schedule, which means the breaks I’ve had since the departure of Readstyreo will be filled and my evening schedule will need to be a bit more regimented (likely no Wednesday night Commander games for a while.). I want to make sure that my planning is intentional and my class periods go smoothly, so I will be getting back in the habit of doing my nightly planning, and making sure any materials or quizzes are written before the day I need them. This may require me to refer to my text books prior to lessons and put some more thought into any graphic organizers I plan to employ.

My tutoring schedule has also been beefed up progressively over the past few weeks, which has made my decision to stop working on the weekends much more justified. Overall my Monday through Thursday schedule feels tight, but in order to keep up the quality of work I’ve been doing—and to sharpen things where they need to be sharpened—my Fridays and Sundays are going to need some additional structure. This Friday, if plans call for it, I may come to Gateway in the morning and look over the readings for the coming week to be certain of what I need to plan for. I’ve been getting away with not doing this so far, but given how close I live to the school, it makes little sense not to take the opportunity to plan in a space that is more conducive to work than my couch.

Today I have returned to my mindfulness practice and have incorporated a small extension of my morning meditation, centered around productivity and the breath. Four times in total, I will have taken the time to take four complete breaths, pausing at different points in the day to complete the exercise. Usually I don’t give much thought to the recommendations of my given meditation session as I progress through the day, but today felt different. With any luck I will continue to extend my engagement with mindfulness as I progress through the week.

On the reading and writing front, I have decided to take a class with the Porch starting in October, which I need to sign up for sooner rather than later, as my previous choices have been sold out before I’ve gotten the chance to register. I also plan to finish my current personal reading book as soon as I can, returning to my nightly reading habit tonight.

This post would ordinarily fall on a Sunday, but I’m not going to let that fact weigh me down. I will make an effort to update this blog at least one more time in the midweek, once I meet my new students and have a sense of who they are.

My heroic motto has been: “Life will pass through. Keep being you.” I don’t plan on changing that motto, as it is both aspirational and centering. I merely wish to rededicate myself to this cause. I want to be the best teacher I can be, and even when things are difficult and I’m thrown off course, I intend to remain myself, to the best of my ability. Sometimes I will need the support of friends and family, but come what may, I will do what I can to keep fighting for another good day.

I’m looking forward to seeing this week and these goals through.

Until next time, life will pass through. Keep being you.

After a few weeks of steady climbing, we’ve reached something of a valley in the current Adventure.

This past week was a short one for me, but by the end of it, I managed to get two of my three active Gateway students--The Studious Scholar and The Relentless Wordsmith--to the tail end of their current units: a culminating writing assignment. The Heckish Health Advisor--whose heroic identity seems to be in flux following a loss of his cat--smoothly transitioned from Unit 1 to 2, and should be done with Unit 2 by the end of this week. Readstyreo (I’m not sure either of us has decided on the proper spelling) is still out, but my tutoring schedule is ramping up to make up for his absence.

Because a lot of what my students will be working on this week is largely independent work, I want to make sure I don’t let myself rest on my laurels. For Scholar and Wordsmith, I will commit to spending a portion of each day’s class period doing some kind of short writing intensive lesson, meant to zero in on some part of the writing process that is relevant to the day. If I want them to finish their rough drafts by Thursday, some brisk pacing is going to be necessary on both of our parts, but I think we can do it.

The Advisor only has about two days worth of content left in this unit (We’ll be reading some portions of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings and doing a quiz on Point of View, Character and Voice, and the unit’s two main texts by the end of the week) so I want to make sure we can do something creative before the close of the unit, likely on Wednesday. Our next unit will see him reading more fiction with a mind to write his own original short story, and I want to make sure he knocks it out of the park.

As for my personal goals, I did finish An Unquiet Mind, and I started to get back into a book I had shelved a few months back, the charming YA romance, What If It’s Us by Becky Albertalli (of Love, Simon fame) and Adam Silvera. So far I’ve only done one reading session for it, but I was able to make solid progress. I’ll be jumping back in tonight. I hope to also continue making progress on the writing front, and I’m glad that people liked my SU:TM review! More reviews of mine will likely hit this blog in the future.

With mindfulness, I started out the week fairly strong, managing to do one meditation on Monday and two mindfulness sessions on Tuesday, but the rest of the week got a little more challenging, until Thursday, where I didn’t meditate at all. I’m going to pick right back up where I left off tomorrow, making sure I get out of the house early enough to meditate and prepare for the day’s lessons.

I’ll maintain and add to my goals from last week:

2 daily mindfulness meditation sessions (10-20 mins total)

30 minutes of reading or writing per night

One writing intensive sub-lesson per day for my essayists.

I want to write more midweek posts this week, so currently I’m looking to publish a review for An Unquiet Mind at some point this week, and at least one lesson planning check-in.

Until next time, life will pass through, keep being you.