School is starting in about 3 days and I should be going over plans, researching my brains out, getting into the thick of teacher preparations. I should ..... but in this moment, I'm not going to.
All the sessions on investing our students, behavior management, lesson planning, parent involvement, big goals, little goals, data trackers, even my brief summer class I taught this summer.. they've all seemed to vanish in my mind. I pushed them out and deliberately dropped them out of my mental window.
This summer was one of the most challenging things I have ever embarked on. In the crush of things, I started to hate my over-crowded mind. There were so many new skill-sets and ideas and opinions to suck in that I felt burned out. I felt older than the fresh-faced, recent college grads that were full of ideas and enthusiasm. I felt cynical and unsure of our teacher bootcamp and it really held me back. Whenever I told my students "You are the only thing holding yourself back" I felt like a complete hypocrite. My own lack of confidence in my teaching abilities held me back all summer long and no matter how hard I worked or how many revisions I made, I knew that my mind wasn't in it because I just couldn't believe in myself.
My advisor knew that my mind wasn't completely wrapped around teaching this summer. When I expressed my doubts about my own capabilities, not knowing the material I was teaching, not feeling like we had been adequately trained and given enough time to digest the content before having to spit it back out at our kids... She reminded me that there were 48,000 applicants that year for this job, and out of those I was among only 4,800 chosen. She looked at me and reminded me not to lose sight of the fact that I was chosen for a reason and wouldn't be there if I didn't possess the leadership skill that I so doubted at that moment. I kept doubting myself all summer and there were moments that I stood back and asked myself if I was really the best person to do this job.
Then my curriculum specialist said something in one of our last sessions: "Building a classroom is like building a brand. Your students really have to buy into it."
To the majority of people, it may have been just another analogy, but to me, it was a magical phrase that un-locked a lot of the things I had forgotten about myself. As a former corporate designer, building a brand is exactly the kind of thing I know how to do. In this world of newness I felt like someone had finally said something I could understand and relate to. I remembered what my advisor had told me and all of those leadership skills that I didn't think I possessed came rushing back.
In the mayhem of learning how to be a teacher, I forgot how to be a leader. I definitely lost track of my vision and most importantly my belief in myself.
So in these few days before the fall terms start, instead of freaking out like the rookie teacher I am, I'm going to give myself a little more time to just believe in me.
