Spinning Plates

The life of a first year fifth grade teacher is SUPER busy. Once I feel like I almost have everything under control, a new task gets dumped on my plate.

Speaking of plates, back in August during New to FISD training, we had an amazing guest speaker that spoke to the group. There was one part of his speech that has stuck with me ever since and echoes in my head many days.

If you've ever seen someone spinning plates before, you know that they can get the first one spinning pretty good, and then add another plate to spin, and then another. By this time the first plate starts to wobble a little bit, so the plate spinner has to run over and get it spinning again. The plate spinner continues to add more spinning plates, while at the same time keep the ones already spinning from getting too wobbly that they fall down. So long as you continue to add spinning plates, it is inevitable that some eventually come crashing down.

The speaker told us, don't spin too many plates, because it will only result in some crashing down. And you don't want the plate that crashes to be your marriage, or time with your family.

Obviously I'm not married, or have any children, so my job consumes me. I'm not rushing out the door at school, because I only go home and continue to think about my to-do list. My spinning plates are: grading papers, lesson planning, making station games, staff meetings, First Steps training, Student Council, Flipped Classroom committee, tutoring, ARD paperwork, 504 paperwork, SST paperwork, "go watch this video and read this powerpoint,"staff emails, parent emails, parent phone calls, parent conferencing, making my copies, collaborative team planning, writing receipts for Pine Cove, TEACHING, PDAS evaluation, etc. etc. etc.

This is why I am at school until 7:00pm every single night, and still go up on Saturdays. The 50 minute "conference period" we are given to take care of the administration business is usually taken with some sort of meeting, or other last minute task.

Because I've sold my soul to my school: my apartment is constantly a disaster, I'm too exhausted to use my gym membership, my eating habits suffer, I cant find the time to make my eye doctor appointment, or dentist appt. and I have seen friends outside of school maybe twice in the past 3 months.

At this point in the year, the kids have really grown to love us, and we love them! When I say "us" I mean myself the math teacher, Cynde the science teacher, and Dayna the Reading teacher. The three of us work really well together and collaborate well with the 3 bilingual teachers. We are a great team and working with them is fun. Although I haven't seen my friends outside of school, our team and some other teachers I've gotten to know hang out after those 12 hour days. Parents are so complimentary at our conferences, and the kids are getting so excited to go to Pine Cove in a few weeks!

I just have to keep looking forward to Thanksgiving break! Can't wait to spend time with my family!