Embracing the Struggle

New teachers, student teachers, pre-service teachers, this one's for you: If you are pursuing a career in teaching your particular field of study, then you probably love your content. In fact, you probably love it a lot, and that passionate interest is probably a big reason why you're a teacher at all. You probably spent four(?) years of undergraduate education studying your content in great depth, becoming more and more passionate about it as time passed. I know in music, this is especially true.  (If you're not a music teacher, feel free to insert whatever content you  are  passionate about and view the rest of the post through that lens).  Even as music education  majors, we tend to spend a large percentage of our undergraduate education studying music theory and history, practicing our primary instrument, and climbing the rungs of the performance ensembles. Training in this conservatory model tends to distort our perception a bit: we often think of ourse...

Resilience is something I've been thinking about a great deal this week. Between my struggles to bounce back from the turmoil in my school and talking with a colleague about a very different, but no less traumatic, event that hit her school this week, the topic has never been far from my mind. What makes a person, or a staff, or a community resilient? Are certain people just more resilient than others? Or do some of us just have resilience thrust upon us? I  truly do not know if I or my staff are inherently resilient, or if we are resilient because we have been given no other choice. Maybe we are all just really caring and awesome and skilled individuals (I'm not going to completely discount that possibility). But maybe we are just the product of circumstance. We continue to encounter new and varied sh*tstorms as the year progresses, and since you can't just cancel the remainder of a school year, we keep showing up as we would if everything was fine. Whatever the reason...

What do you do when this blow feels like the blow you can't come back from? When you've been knocked down over and over and over again, and you keep pulling yourself back up, does there come a point when you just stay down? Hanging by a thread. Dealing with every challenge, every struggle. We took every hit and carried on. But this? I don't know how to survive this. There's a quotation that says something to the effect of "if you're going through hell, keep going." Apparently Winston Churchill said it. I remember it from some disposable country song they used to play on the radio. Do we keep going through hell because we know we can make it out through the other side? Or because we literally have no other option? You bury yourself in the work. The work is still there. Of course it is. Omnipresent. Never-ceasing. There will always be kids that need you. So you walk back in and you do your job. Possibly because you just don't know what else...