That quotation, "no plan survives contact with the enemy" is a paraphrased version of this quote by Field Marshall Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke, a Prussian general who was the architect of the German Wars of Unification in the 19th Century:
"The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle. In this sense one should understand Napoleon's saying: 'I have never had a plan of operations.' Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."
Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke never had to teach middle school children or work in a public school in the early 21st Century, but if he had I am sure the experience would only reinforce his belief that you can have all the plans you want, but once you encounter your first hostile force everything is going to go to hell.
I went into this year with a plan. I went in with goals that I was excited about and that seemed imminently achievable. I was going to take a more loving, trauma-informed approach to my instruction and my classroom. This was going to be an amazing year and I was going to be way more positive and not let the things that always wear me down do that to me this year.
Then the following happened:
*My school made a TON of changes. Too much change, too soon, turns out. We added a character education class that means I lost my rehearsals with my top choir for the first seven days of school and then every first day of the week from now until the end of the year. That may not seem like a big deal, but that select choir gets me out of bed every morning and sets the tone for my whole day. It does the same thing for most of the kids who are in it. It has not been fun on the days that we don't get to meet and it has been tough to get into a rhythm with that choir.
*We now start and end the school day an hour later than we used to, based on adolescent sleep research. I don't really want to debate whether this is a good idea for kids or not, I am just saying that for me personally, it has thrown off my whole routine. I still get up at the same time I used to, and because I pretty much always have an after school activity or rehearsal of some sort, I am not leaving school until 5 or 5:30 every day and I come home completely exhausted. So I'm struggling with that too.
*My 8th grade girls are shaping up to be the most emotional class of 8th grade girls I have had in several years, and that is already concerning me and draining me of some energy as I have to deal with their various issues.
*I got word that a conference I had auditioned my Prairie Voices for did not accept them as a performing choir, which was especially discouraging since we had already been rejected from a different conference earlier this summer.
But none of that stuff really holds a candle to what happened last week, when a teacher at my school, whom I had worked with for years, got arrested for doing something very, very bad. I am not supposed to comment on it since it's an ongoing investigation, and I won't comment on it (disclaimer: any district higher ups who are reading this-let's face it, of course you're not reading this-I have said all I'm going to say about the incident, which is far less information than a person could find on the news, so leave me alone please) but needless to say it was horrible and awful and threw our entire building, our entire community into turmoil and cast a dark cloud over our entire school year.
So the lesson is: staying positive is really freaking hard.
The day after the arrest, after that teacher's mugshot was all over the news and our school's name was dragged through the mud, was one of the hardest teaching days I've ever had (though it still doesn't beat my very first day at Prairie or teaching the day after the 2016 Presidential Election). I got through the rest of the week, and I got through this week, and now I'm resting, dealing with a cold that kindly held off until Friday night, and using the three day weekend to process and try to heal a little bit.
I have not been very good at staying positive the last two weeks. In fact I've been pretty negative. I feel like I've been sucker-punched, like the rug was pulled out from under me only three weeks into the school year. I know a lot of my colleagues are feeling the same way and I can't imagine how my administration is feeling given the amount of crap they have had to deal with already, in a year where we supposed to really turn things around. It is awful and I don't really know what I'm going to do.
It's not all bad. My kids are great. I have a few with run-of-the-mill behavior problems but no one yet who seems like they are going to get a gray hair named after them. Most of them are really sweet and positive and they like to sing. The stuff that's weighing on me has nothing to do with my kids or my program, it's everything else.
So why can't I just ignore all the other stuff and focus on my kids, on "my own four walls" as a friend of mine used to call it? Well I'm trying. The problem is that all of this garbage is wearing me down and reducing my capacity to cope. Which means when I have some run-of-the-mill problem like the sixth grader who doesn't want to sing because they think my class is "boring" or the eighth grade girls having a super emotional day, I am not as good at dealing with it. And then after the fact I feel like the world is ending and the year is going to be terrible because I just don't have the capacity to handle these things.
This is how I've felt for the past two years (usually March-May) as the amount of frustration and secondary trauma I've been absorbing and lack of taking care of myself catches up with me and burns me out. I was really hoping to turn over a new leaf this year, but I am falling back into old habits and not getting off to a good start.
So here's hoping I can hit the reset button. I think this year can still be a good one, and I think I owe it to myself and everyone who has to interact with me on a daily basis to really put forth the effort to practice better self-care. Not to mention that my students who walk into my classroom every day deserve to be loved and to be given the best choral experience possible, whether I am struggling or not. They didn't ask for things to be the way they are, but they need me to be there every day for them. So I will be. I'll keep coming to work and taking this already crazy, uncertain year a day at a time. And hopefully that plan will better survive contact with the enemy than the last one did.
"The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle. In this sense one should understand Napoleon's saying: 'I have never had a plan of operations.' Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."
Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke never had to teach middle school children or work in a public school in the early 21st Century, but if he had I am sure the experience would only reinforce his belief that you can have all the plans you want, but once you encounter your first hostile force everything is going to go to hell.
I went into this year with a plan. I went in with goals that I was excited about and that seemed imminently achievable. I was going to take a more loving, trauma-informed approach to my instruction and my classroom. This was going to be an amazing year and I was going to be way more positive and not let the things that always wear me down do that to me this year.
Then the following happened:
*My school made a TON of changes. Too much change, too soon, turns out. We added a character education class that means I lost my rehearsals with my top choir for the first seven days of school and then every first day of the week from now until the end of the year. That may not seem like a big deal, but that select choir gets me out of bed every morning and sets the tone for my whole day. It does the same thing for most of the kids who are in it. It has not been fun on the days that we don't get to meet and it has been tough to get into a rhythm with that choir.
*We now start and end the school day an hour later than we used to, based on adolescent sleep research. I don't really want to debate whether this is a good idea for kids or not, I am just saying that for me personally, it has thrown off my whole routine. I still get up at the same time I used to, and because I pretty much always have an after school activity or rehearsal of some sort, I am not leaving school until 5 or 5:30 every day and I come home completely exhausted. So I'm struggling with that too.
*My 8th grade girls are shaping up to be the most emotional class of 8th grade girls I have had in several years, and that is already concerning me and draining me of some energy as I have to deal with their various issues.
*I got word that a conference I had auditioned my Prairie Voices for did not accept them as a performing choir, which was especially discouraging since we had already been rejected from a different conference earlier this summer.
But none of that stuff really holds a candle to what happened last week, when a teacher at my school, whom I had worked with for years, got arrested for doing something very, very bad. I am not supposed to comment on it since it's an ongoing investigation, and I won't comment on it (disclaimer: any district higher ups who are reading this-let's face it, of course you're not reading this-I have said all I'm going to say about the incident, which is far less information than a person could find on the news, so leave me alone please) but needless to say it was horrible and awful and threw our entire building, our entire community into turmoil and cast a dark cloud over our entire school year.
So the lesson is: staying positive is really freaking hard.
The day after the arrest, after that teacher's mugshot was all over the news and our school's name was dragged through the mud, was one of the hardest teaching days I've ever had (though it still doesn't beat my very first day at Prairie or teaching the day after the 2016 Presidential Election). I got through the rest of the week, and I got through this week, and now I'm resting, dealing with a cold that kindly held off until Friday night, and using the three day weekend to process and try to heal a little bit.
I have not been very good at staying positive the last two weeks. In fact I've been pretty negative. I feel like I've been sucker-punched, like the rug was pulled out from under me only three weeks into the school year. I know a lot of my colleagues are feeling the same way and I can't imagine how my administration is feeling given the amount of crap they have had to deal with already, in a year where we supposed to really turn things around. It is awful and I don't really know what I'm going to do.
It's not all bad. My kids are great. I have a few with run-of-the-mill behavior problems but no one yet who seems like they are going to get a gray hair named after them. Most of them are really sweet and positive and they like to sing. The stuff that's weighing on me has nothing to do with my kids or my program, it's everything else.
So why can't I just ignore all the other stuff and focus on my kids, on "my own four walls" as a friend of mine used to call it? Well I'm trying. The problem is that all of this garbage is wearing me down and reducing my capacity to cope. Which means when I have some run-of-the-mill problem like the sixth grader who doesn't want to sing because they think my class is "boring" or the eighth grade girls having a super emotional day, I am not as good at dealing with it. And then after the fact I feel like the world is ending and the year is going to be terrible because I just don't have the capacity to handle these things.
This is how I've felt for the past two years (usually March-May) as the amount of frustration and secondary trauma I've been absorbing and lack of taking care of myself catches up with me and burns me out. I was really hoping to turn over a new leaf this year, but I am falling back into old habits and not getting off to a good start.
So here's hoping I can hit the reset button. I think this year can still be a good one, and I think I owe it to myself and everyone who has to interact with me on a daily basis to really put forth the effort to practice better self-care. Not to mention that my students who walk into my classroom every day deserve to be loved and to be given the best choral experience possible, whether I am struggling or not. They didn't ask for things to be the way they are, but they need me to be there every day for them. So I will be. I'll keep coming to work and taking this already crazy, uncertain year a day at a time. And hopefully that plan will better survive contact with the enemy than the last one did.
Comments