Snow Days

After coming back from a collaborative meeting in Gallup late last night and having a 55 minute drive last almost an hour and a half because of the condition of the roads, I figured there would be a school delay today. There was. I got a little extra sleep but still headed down to my classroom early to prep for the day. It was a wonderful surprise to be greeted at the door by my principal and sent home. School is canceled making today our third snow day of the year (more snow days than they have had in my home state of New Hampshire... that's something I sure didn't expect out in New Mexico). It feels pretty awesome, but this snow day is actually slightly bitter sweet, another day of teaching lost... The fact that this bitter sweet reaction is one that I have for training days, testing days, and now snow days really shows me how much I've grown as a teacher this year.

Starting last August and lasting right up through Christmas, any day that I wasn't teaching was one that I looked forward to. In service days, Awesome... Need someone to give the PSATs? I'm all over that... Special Ed training in Gallup? I can go!... A variety of trainings, meetings, or tests meant my class was handed over to other teachers or subs and I was relieved of the responsibility of actually teaching for one more day. This responsibility of teaching was still one that felt overwhelming, and I definitely doubted my ability to teach as well. That's what made non teaching days so great.

While I still feel overwhelmed by the high level of responsibility that comes with teaching, and I of course still doubt my ability to do the job well on some days, I have more of a sense of urgency and competency this semester. I know what I'm trying to do in my classroom and I have an idea of how we are going to do it. This week my students were supposed to be able to solve problems with sine, cosine, and tangent by Friday. They really needed to do that this week so we could finish up our unit and move on next week. We still have a lot of standards to cover. But now, because of two non-teaching days (a day of training for me and a snow day for everyone), we'll fall another few days behind in our long term plans.

I plan to enjoy my snow day. I'm going to go for a run, take my dog for a walk on the mesas, cook a good meal with my roommates, and maybe even read my "just for fun" book. Despite this wonderful lazy day, I do feel a little bit of anger and frustration at missing yet another day of teaching time. While it's a bummer that these non-teaching days that seemed to be my salvation last semester have become very bitter sweet, I think it's just representative of me taking one more step towards actually becoming a good teacher. That's a nice thing to experience.