Yes... I am one of those people. However, before you begin to judge me I have to make some things VERY clear.
I am not Catholic. Therefore, I do not have any religious obligation to give anything up for Lent. I simply choose to do it, as a quest for personal betterment. Anyway, I think it's better when we do stuff for God when it's not done out of a sense of obligation, but rather, when it is done as a conscious decision and desire to become closer to Him. Because I participate in Lent as a strict personal choice, I do not judge anyone else who does or does not choose to participate. If you are Catholic... cool. If you are not Catholic... cool. I consider myself to be non-denominationally Protestant. I believe the Bible. I believe Christ died for my sins. I believe that I sin daily, and I need to work to better myself and share Christ's love with those around me. Everything else, in my opinion (all of the ceremonial requirements, personal beliefs/interpretations, etc.), is just background noise that gets in the way of what Christianity is really all about: "To know Christ and to make Him known."
Facebook, as sad as it may be, is, in fact, a vice of mine. I can spend a positively RIDICULOUS amount of time on Facebook if I do not monitor myself. Sometimes I log-on with the intentions of checking it quickly for 10 minutes, and the next thing I know, I look up at the clock and two hours have passed. YIKES! So, in other words, I do not give up Facebook because "everyone else is doing it" or because it is easy. In fact, I do it for the exact opposite reasons: it is NOT easy for me, and I am trying to care LESS what others are doing because I spend too much time caring about that when I am on Facebook, and I SHOULD be spending that time actually doing something with MY life.
I gave up Facebook because I wanted to spend the time I normally spend on Facebook doing more productive things, such as reading my Bible, cleaning my house, keeping up with grading/lesson planning, BLOGGING (and Tweeting) on a semi-regular basis (more than once a month, and ideally, more than once a week), AND preparing for a baby. My husband and I are expecting our first child around June 21st of this year, and we have A LOT of ducks to get in a row before we are ready for Baby Clark. I have not hit my so-called "nesting" phase yet, where I begin cleaning like a mad woman, but being a teacher, I need to "nest" now while I can because May will be here before I know it, and then, I may not have time to "nest" because of the craziness that comes with the end of the school year. Also, I will probably be huge in May, and I'd rather not actually resemble a waddling penguin while doing said "nesting."
I gave up Facebook for Lent last year, and it felt good to not care for 40+ days what was going on in everybody else's world. It felt good to not get angry after reading stupid people's stupid status updates and/or drama and/or political slander. It felt good to not stumble onto students' Facebook pages and get depressed by the fact that their parents don't realize the junk they are posting/liking and get even more depressed when I realize their parents are also on Facebook, are "friends" with their child, and STILL do not realize or care about the junk they are posting/liking. It felt good to come home and have to find something else to do for a change (usually something more productive). And... I GOT MORE STUFF DONE! So, I'm hoping that this year is a repeat of last year. I can wash all that voyeuristic ickiness away and use my time in a way that makes me feel better about life.
Having said all of that. I hope it has become clearer as to why I have chosen to give up Facebook for Lent. Hopefully this sacrifice will result in more blogging over the next 40 days or so. So, if you still want to make fun of me, go right ahead, but just remember... I was never doing this for you anyway.
I consider myself a realist... with pessimistic tendencies. The glass is NOT half empty. The glass is NOT half full. It is quite simply half of a glass.
However, some days... a lot of days, lately, it seems... my inner cynic creeps out and wreaks havoc on my realism. Some would say that being a realist is already negative enough, but trust me... I can definitely be more negative. In fact, being negative comes all too easily to me sometimes.
Thursdays tend to be very frustratingly long days for me. On top of my typical teaching workday, I come home on Thursdays only to have to turn around and get ready immediately for the evening classes that I have been taking as I work toward my certification as an English as a Second Language Program Specialist. I am working on this certification to help me achieve my Level II teaching certification (a.k.a. my permanent teaching certification). Anyone who is a fellow teacher can commiserate with me on how frustrating it is as a teacher to have to constantly meet Continuing Education requirements just to maintain the validity of one's certification.
It's a LOT of work to be a teacher. Just go ahead and say, "But you get summers off!" I dare you! Because when you do, I will then proceed to verbally punch you in the face, while I imagine actually doing it.
So, clearly, based on that little tirade alone, you can see that Thursdays tend to frustrate the living hell out of me and bring out the inner pessimist that lurks beneath my realist facade. Now, do not misunderstand me. I LOVE my ESL classes! I have been learning so much from them, and I have an AWESOME teacher! However, 3 hours of class after a full-day of teaching is not for the faint of heart, especially when getting to those 3-hour classes requires a little less than 2 hours of driving. Needless to say, I am thankful that the day following this schedule is a Friday.
As if all of this were not enough to explain my pessimism this morning, I am even further frustrated by Thursdays because they are "Advisory Days." Advisory is a short 24-minute chunk of time taken out of every Thursday morning that is devoted to our school's anti-bullying efforts. This 24-minute chunk has to come from somewhere, so the rest of the morning classes get condensed until the schedule is able to be corrected in time for the lunch rotations to begin. So, every Thursday, I lose 6 minutes of my prep period (which adds up to A LOT over the whole school year), and I lose 15 minutes of instructional time. VERY FRUSTRATING INDEED!
Do NOT get me wrong! I think it is great that we are doing more to address the issue of bullying; however, talking about bullying with 5th graders often turns them into huge tattle-tales the rest of the day. EVERYTHING becomes bullying to them. Even when you explain the difference between just being mean and bullying, which is recurrent, they still find a way to turn EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN into a bullying crisis. The other extreme is apathy: kids who could care less... often either the bullies themselves of the bystanders who do nothing. There are very few kids who actually absorb the information and process it the way that it needs to be, so it ends up, often, turning into this big, frustrating, pain-in-butt waste of time.
So, when I looked at the agenda for today's Advisory period, and saw that we were doing this activity about these things called "Lollipop Moments," I internally rolled my eyes and thought, "Fan-freaking-tastic! I really need to practice Reading skills with my kids, and instead, we have to talk about 'Lollipop Moments!' What the crap kind of cheese-ball thing is this?!" So, I went into the whole experience very negatively. I did not preview the video we were to show the kids because I could not seem to find the will to care enough to do so. So, when I began playing the video for the students, it was the first time any of us, including myself, had ever seen it.
Now, any time you show a video, there are always those couple of kids who will sit and talk no matter how entertaining the video is, but during this video, many of the kids were legitimately paying attention. Even more shocking, I was legitimately paying attention. Rather than trying to explain it too much, I will include the video clip below.
Basically, "Lollipop Moments," are moments when someone has profoundly changed your life for the better without their even realizing it. The project we had the kids do related to this initiative required them to write the name of person who had changed their lives for the better on a paper lollipop and then decorate it. When everyone has finished their lollipops and turned them in, they will be put on display in the school where everyone can see just how many people have changed the lives of others. It's actually pretty cool when you think about it, and a real shocker... almost all of my students took the project seriously! They were not just coming up with the stereotypical easy answer of "Mom" or "Dad" (and I truly believe that the ones who did write that TRULY meant it), but they were coming up with real names of real people I had never heard of before. Names which I could not put faces to, but who had changed these students' lives so much, they did not even think twice when asked to come up with one. Wow! What a great moment! I was so truly very humbled and my bad attitude put to shame! Someone had actually gotten through to these kids (not me), and it was a BEAUTIFUL thing!
So, when the kids left for lunch (more like brunch since it's at 10:33), I was in a much better mood... but it was STILL Thursday, so when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a kid walk into my recently-emptied room, I was prepared to snap at the 6th grader (a.k.a. my former 5th grader) who was interrupting my lunch period. But, when I looked up, in was walking one of my favorite students from last year. Some teachers will lie and tell you they don't have favorites... but we all do. This girl was one of my favorites because she had a genuinely good heart and a work ethic that would put many adults to shame. She always offered to help me or help others if she finished her work early. She reads like she needs books to breathe, and she made me a picture of a hedgehog because she knew they are my favorite animals! She also would share her stories with me because she knew I loved reading and writing! Well, in walked this student, and her face lit up when I said, "Hi!"
"Hi, Mrs. Clark!" she beamed back at me! "How are you?"
"Good! How are you?"
"Good! So... we did these lollipop things in Advisory today, and we had to write down the name of someone who had inspired us."
"Yeah, we did that, too! Pretty cool, huh?"
"Yeah! Well... I wrote down you... because you inspired me to write."
These are the moments you always imagine are going to be so numerous when you decide you want to become a teacher, but they soon become the moments you find to be, in reality, the rarest of all. The moment when, in your desire to inspire all the kids of the world, you find one kid who inspires you MORE than you could have ever hoped to inspire them!
I was SPEECHLESS, which is truly miraculous if you know me! All I could muster out were a few words of thanks before I started to choke up and asked her if I could give her a hug!
She said yes, and as I held back tears and gave this little girl a hug, I told her that she inspired me, too. I told her someday, we could buy each others' books and give each other our autographs! We both agreed that that sounded like fun. As she walked away, it was all I could do to wait until she left before I began to sob... and I mean SOB.
I was so determined to find everything wrong with today. I was so determined the world was out to get me. I was so determined that things could not possibly go right for me because, after all, it was Thursday. But God appears at the times and places you need Him the most, and today, He appeared in the eyes of a little girl who reminded me that what I do DOES make a difference. Even if most days, I feel like I am talking to a brick wall. Even if most days, I have to listen to people bad mouth my profession and tell me how overpaid I am. Even if most days, I come home and wonder why I do this day after after. THIS is why I teach. SHE is why I teach. I may be a small, small fish in a very large pond, but today, she made me feel like I could rule the seas! Today, I didn't just discover that I gave her a Lollipop Moment; I also realized that she gave me one of my own... and what a truly sweet moment it was! Today, this realistic pessimist found her glass to be not only full, but overflowing!
