BIG thoughts

Done.

Maybe that’s why I took so long to finish the 8th grade poetry book. Because on some level I knew that the completion of that would really mean the end. I mean, what do I really have left to do? Buy envelopes. Pack. Organize. Find those damn letters. Dayanara is afraid to go to high school so she’s subconsciously sabotaging herself with negative behavior. Is it all that different? Probably not.

the sheer volume of information I have in my head is overwhelming on a level I never thought possible. If I thought I could write it all down I’d try, but I don’t know how far I’d get before losing it completely. However, one skill I have perfected this year is learning to take my own advice, and practicing what I preach, so more often than not I find myself saying, “What would I tell a student who had this problem?” It works, surprisingly. I think using student strategies helps talk me down from my metacognitive cliff because a) they are good strategies, b) we are not that different and c) it keeps me humble. So, how would I advise myself?

First, a flood of ideas would deluge my mind. Then, I would consider where the student was coming from on every level I could think of, and suggest something I thought they could handle. So, what can I handle now? Right now, I need structure. I need some way to express these ideas, some medium, because or else I’ll burst (or deflate). But I think I need to structure it so I don’t freak myself out.

Marion’s idea of color coding everything is probably going to help in the later stages of this mental inventory and organization, but for now, I think I’ll just broadly compartmentalize. If I had to put all the info, duties, plans, necessities, every part of my life into three buckets, what would they be labeled?

Personal/me, curriculum, remembering as much as I can.

There. There are my buckets. So, here’s the plan which I just came up with forty five seconds ago. I’m going to carry a notebook. Or maybe a little, four-subject notebook. and I’m going to keep a running list. Listing is another thing I tell students to do, because it’s not as scary as paragraphs and sentences, and more often than not, when you take the pressure out of the equation, most of your bullet points end up being sentences or something like them anyway. But regardless, I’m going to list. Two lists for each, one on computer, one on paper. And that way, I’ll remember everything I can.

How did someone with such poor executive functioning skills by nature get a master’s degree in education? I sit, in this room, in this disastrous hellhole covered with clothes, middle school vampire literature, New Yorker magazines and school supplies, and marvel at my ability to teach nine different classes when I can barely locate my right foot. But I’m working on it. Baby steps.

Just start listing. You might miss something, a thought might fly out of your head while you’re using your brainpower to write another thought on paper, but if you never start writing, odds are you’ll lose both of those thoughts.

I wonder what a thought looks like. That would make a cool personification exercise. If you had to give a visual representation of “thought” how would you do it? Food for thought. HAH thought.

So, I’m glad I wrote all that. I’m sure it’s a mess, but the point is, I wrote it, and in doing so, I talked myself down off of my metaphorical, metacognitive cliff. I wrote to move time. Before I started, it was standing still, and I was not happy about that. I hate when time stops. It’s unnatural, illogical, impractical and wasteful, because inevitably when time starts up again, you miss the time you would have had if time hadn’t stopped. Say time stopped at 12:40 a.m. for roughly two minutes. When time starts again, it’s 12:42, and you’ve missed 120 seconds, skipped, gone, adieu.

But anyway, I hate it when time stops, and when I closed the document, it did just that. When time stops, you feel everything. Where your bangs lay on your forehead. Tongue against inside of your front teeth. Ring sliding down finger. Sometimes I swear sound slows down too, but I’m not entirely sure about that.

I don’t do well with big transitions. In fact, let’s call them negative transitions. I don’t mean bad, I mean diffused. When I suddenly have a lot less to do, and a lot more time, I flip out. The sudden loss of that is horrifying. It’s why I got depressed after running the marathon. I looked
up marathons overseas compulsively. I planned training runs. I even bought new sneakers. You need something to fill a void that size.

The real issue is that my 8th graders will be gone. My eyes are crossing with the revelation. I always tell them sometimes you have to write 5 pages of junk to get to that one great line. Well, I had to ramble about all this GodKnowsWhat to get to this place. The place where I’m going to lose a piece of myself when they go. It’s not weird or inappropriate, it’s just reality. They made me the teacher that I am today. Wow.

Need to sleep on that.

Sometimes I think I'll never have the time and energy to revise my own writing. Well, what I'm doing now is more important anyway.