let every breath

Tonight I feel discouraged. I'm just tired. I'm tired of teaching online and in person. I'm tired of showing up to work unprepared - constantly deciding between the quality of the day I give my kids and the quality of my life outside of work. I'm tired of weekends with what I'm going to do for the next week - Bible, math, reading, reading groups, writing, science, transferring it online, and it continues - hanging over my head.  I have a girl, Alyssa, who stole my heart from the beginning. I call her Lil Lyssa. She's just the sweetest thing. I was gone for a day last week and when I came back, she marched right into the classroom and declared, "Miss Seals, I missed you so much when you were gone! I need a hug!" Later, someone was complaining about school and she said, "What?! Miss Seals was gone for one day and I missed her SO much!" I have never known a kid to be so thoughtful of others - past just thoughtful actions. She is genuinely thinki...

  We begin each day with instrumental music and a small assignment. I used to start the day in silence and project 5 review problems on the board. In fact, that’s what we did for the entirety of the first semester. But over time, I realized no one was happy with it. Some of my kids flew through the review problems, not needing them in the first place. For my kids who needed help, it was overwhelming and resulted in them starting their day with a sense of defeat, the numbers 1 to 5 written neatly in the margins, nothing beside them. To top it off, I had to go over the answers, and with a strict Zoom time at 8:30, I seemed to never make it through, always getting a comment of you’re three minutes late from my dear responsible online child who loves to keep me on my toes.  And so, I scrapped it. And now? I give a small task in the morning. A little journal question, a simple reading activity, a picture where the kids list observations and inferences. And when they finish, they h...