Summer Goals

It hasn’t quite hit me yet – that the usual, daily grind has been postponed for a couple of months. Part of it has to do with my current misery – I’ve been coughing and sick for a couple of days now, coming to a head last night when I came down with a low fever and spent most of my evening huddled beneath blankets and binge-watching HBO. Tonight, I’m at least upright, and this time it’s binge-watching Hulu, but still – I’m not poolside, or even gardenside, by any means.

When I have unbooked time, I habitually create goals. Sometimes it’s just vacuuming and laundry, others it’s plant a whole garden. With two and a half months ahead of me, let’s see what I can do with the time and willpower I have.

1. Grow food!

With the homestead shopping spree still remaining that – shopping, not purchasing – we have piles of seedlings in our window sill with no destination. If we plant now, we’ll move without our seedlings (I joke that’s the only way to find “the” house – by planting the garden, we’ll jinx ourselves into finding the “one” the next day). We had hoped to have a plan by now, but to be honest, there isn’t one. I’m thinking we’ll go ahead and resort to what we did four years ago at our last house – a patio garden! It’s hardly sustainable, and goes against almost all of our hopes and dreams for improving soil, but growing in pots does provide homes for our seedlings and food for our table.

2. Finish my certificate.

For the last two summers, I’ve been working on levels I and II towards my Kodaly methodology certification – each level is offered for 5 hours graduate credit at Wichita State with a two week, ultra-intense course in the beginning of June. Since getting my level I, I have found a wonderful and satisfying new path with my teaching – a child-centered approach that uses folk songs from our student’s cultural traditions, all while enhancing their music literacy abilities to the fullest. This year will be my last of three levels to complete – which will bring me not only my status up to “Kodaly-certified teacher” but also my master’s degree status to “15 hours completed” – and this fall I’ll start in on the rest of my coursework to finish a master’s.

3. Buy a @#$^ house already!

Can you tell I’m feeling frustrated? I heard an NPR report that said in this past quarter of housing sales, houses have sold faster than they ever had in a decade. I can’t tell you how many houses we’ve looked at or gotten ready to look at only to arrive and find out an offer (or 3) was already on the house. It’s exhausting. It’s tiring. We’re at the point where we are happy to get a house with a big backyard just so we can build equity with something, but even that has been hard to find! It’s really stressing me out, so that means I probably ought to…

4. Take a yoga class or learn to meditate.

This school year, especially the last few months, have been stressful. I’m ashamed to admit how often I’ve broken down in tears or how often my husband has gotten some kind of exhausted or facepalm emoji through text the last couple of months. I. Need. A. Break. I’ve barely had time for myself, none for my friends or family, much less patience for any of the aforementioned. I’m going to start with some organizing to help me feel in order and then just some plain old sleep. It’s wonderful how therapeutic being in the garden can be, so as soon as I feel up for some exposure to allergens I’ll head out to the garden to weed and explore with the kitties.

Longterm, it would not be a bad plan for my mental health to establish a yoga or meditation routine. Even YouTube has some fabulous guides and gurus, and quite honestly I just need to step up and recognize how much I need this and do it already!

5. Get some thorough work done on my long-term planning.

In order to know what to teach, you need to have an end goal for your students – what do you want them to know when they leave your classroom at the end of your school year together? From there, when do you want to teach those goals, and how? With what resources or focuses? I want to take time to develop my concept plans and long-term planning, now that I’m entering my fourth year of teaching. My first several years were about experimenting, surviving, trying new things, and seeing what fits – how long it takes to teach a concept, that sort of thing. Now that I feel like I have the handle of it, it’s time to think broader, more deeply, and with more effectiveness.

 

Most of all, I want to spend time with myself, my friends, my family, and to relax. After all, it is summer.

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Graduation

It’s that time of year – wrapping up lesson plans and packing away supplies for the summer, endless graduation parties, saying goodbye to our students. For me, it’s a particularly-tough end of the year, saying goodbye to a hundred little faces that I’ve loved for the last two years. Part of the heart-wrenching part of working for a school district is just that – we work for a district, not a school, and our contract isn’t tied to a building. With numbers and circumstances changing, one of my school assignments is changing, so today I gave hugs and love to my little ones as I said goodbye on their last day of music.

While for so many, the end of the school year marks the end of an era – the end of 5th grade, the end of college, and, for some teachers, then end of a career. As I sit here on the couch, nursing a late-spring fever and miserable cough, I’m reminded that it’s never really the end, but merely the restart of another lap around the track. We’ll toast to the end of another year, schedule vacations, put our feet up, but we start the preparation for next fall as soon as our students walk out the door. Come this fall, we’ll be greeted with a similar batch of excited, beaming faces intermixed with tired, unsure ones and still need to inspire them to the same results through our teaching. We’ll face the same, miserable stacks of paperwork, exciting workshops with new ideas, complain about the same types of issues, celebrate the victories, and face that student that just makes you want to cry after trying everything. (Today, I had that student laugh at me and try to hurt me by saying that I must be getting fired if I’m moving schools, to my dismay and to the shock of all his classmates. Unfortunately, no explanation would persuade him from thinking it was the truth – and I left today hoping dearly I had made some kind of difference in this poor child’s education, with all the struggles we’ve had. It was not a good morning.)

But alas, the years don’t always get to end with a perfect, wonderful goodbye – sometimes they are messy and imperfect. All we can do is learn from each day and let it (hopefully) influence the next experience for the better. For a teacher, our years are a cycle, of hard months to exciting months, of challenging students to sweet notes on Valentine’s Day, of evening concerts to a much-needed summer vacation. While our students may close their books and move to the next school or graduate from their last classroom ever, we continue in the cycle – to rinse, refresh, be inspired, and begin again.

Happy summer, my friends.

All Quiet on the Home Front

It’s been far too long since I’ve been able to sit down and write. In fact, this is the first night I’ve really been home and not been running off to meetings, concerts, projects, or heading out of town. My poor kitties won’t leave me alone when I’m home, they’ve missed me so much! Olivia, in the picture above, has missed going outside with me, so the last couple of days we’ve been trying to stock up on some more outdoor exploration time with her brother and I.

On the home front, all is quiet, unfortunately. We chose to retract our offer on the lake house we were pursuing a few weeks ago. It was relieving and disappointing all at once – we had made it all through the inspection process when we found out that it needed some significant electrical, HVAC, and roofing improvements in addition to nearly $200 a month in flood insurance. I’ve learned to always check the county website and verify flood insurance requirements and whether or not homeowner’s associations restrict the property FIRST, rather than find out what zoning requirements are on the land AFTER the offer has been made. To be honest, the stress of the financial burden we were facing was starting to physically and emotionally hurt. While there were 2.5 acres of promising land with which to be sustainable, the comfort gathered from growing your own food can only outweigh the risk of financial ruin so much.

We said ‘goodbye’ to this vacation home, this house with it’s own dock and hundred-year elm trees behind the pole barn. After letting go, we spent a week or so refusing to think about moving. The headache, the money we couldn’t refund from the inspection and appraisal fees, the dozens of documents we had to collect and upload to our bank – we just couldn’t do the exhausting, stressful cycle all over again so soon. We focused on moving my mother-in-law up from Wichita and being astounded at Cattigan’s new defensiveness towards the new cat in the house (a small child came to visit the house once and he hid behind the couch because the baby moved, and now the same cat is prowling around the door to the guest bedroom and is intent on jumping Sharon’s cat if she ever emerges).

My mother-in-law definitely shares in our love of all green things – I drove back home with this happy jungle of hers in my front seat! 

After a bit, we began to see houses again, and the last handful or so have come close but not quite good enough – either no place for my mother-in-law, not enough space in the backyard, or out of our price range, or some combination of the three. We have another one to visit tomorrow, a fixer upper on 5 acres just 5 minutes from town, about which I am cautiously optimistic – there are apparently horrible urine smells and the house has been filled to the brim with hoarded items, but if the bones are good, we could do a lot with a cheap home and flip it to be our little dream home. It’s half the price of the lake house property – and we’d be paying 30% less on a mortgage than we currently pay in rent. Plus, what better time to create a truly green space – energy-efficient appliances, recycled materials countertops, energy-efficient windows, solar panels, and more.

In the meantime, I’m spending my afternoons shoving my new little flower plantings back into their containers and shooing the scavenging squirrels away as we wind down the school year. Only five more days with students and then it’s time to take 5 more hours of my masters program – and we’re off to summer!