Tomorrow begins year 32. This will be my 10th school in those 32 years, two high schools (disasters), three K-8 parochial schools and five K-5 elementary schools. Yes, I’ve taught K-12, but my favorite is elementary. A week from tomorrow, I’ll meet a completely new batch of kids which is both exciting and nerve wracking. The consequences of being a hummingbird I’m afraid, flitting from job to job because I always want to try something new and see what it’s like.

This year presents one particular challenge in that I’ll be teaching half time AND working at the district office the other half. Three days on and three days off. Needless to say EVERYthing will be written on multiple calendars. That also means three days with kids and three days with adults, a balance I’ve not ever had before. This could be very interesting. Not that I don’t love kids, but if you’ve taught before, you know taking a break once in a while is a good thing. For me, it will be a regular thing.

So I traded a brand new classroom big enough to land a plane in for a square room with high ceilings built sometime in the 1960’s. The great thing is this new room has windows where my last room was the only room in the building that didn’t. It makes a difference. I have strategically placed my desk next to the window for the morning light and will soon have plants on the windowsill.

Why the change? Well, you never know what life is going to throw at you. First there was this pandemic, which somehow led to a brand new job at the board office while I was playing executive director (another disaster). The great thing about getting older is that you begin to realize life is too short to hang out doing something you either hate or have no skills for, so I ditched the airplane hangar and the executive director gig and have chosen to hang out with some new kids again. You see, kids can be a lot of work, but I expect them to be a lot of work. They can also be a LOT of fun. I’m looking forward to the fun.

The thing I’m not always great with is meeting new people. Adult type people. I can work with kids all day, but ice breakers and meetings all day with adults are not always easy, especially when they’re new. Seriously, just throw me in a room with 20 Kindergarteners and I’ll have them eating out of my hand in 5 minutes. I’m grateful that over the last decade or so, I’ve had to travel, meet new people and step out of my comfort zone many times, so there are strategies now to having conversations with people I’ve never met. Still not my favorite, but I can manage now. And I have a girl space at home where I can hide at the end of the day to re-energize for the next day. I can do this.

The questions always remain, however. Can I just walk into a room and teach anyone? Will my new staff like me? Will the community like what I do with and for the kids? I’m not looking for reassurance here, but there’s always that fear that sometime, someone is going to figure out I have no idea what I’m doing. I think they call that imposter syndrome. Probably not a real syndrome, but people have to label everything nowadays. Compound this feeling with the fact that I’ve had the opportunity to walk into many classrooms over the last couple of years and seen teachers doing some amazing things. Things that I don’t do in my classroom. Things that I could LEARN to do in my classroom, if it fits my personality. Maybe you CAN teach an old dog new tricks. (Am I supposed to be the dog in this scenario?). Or maybe as my friend Tom told me, I’m modeling life-long learning. Sounds better than the old dog thing.

Tomorrow steps over the line of doing this teaching thing slightly more than half my life. At some point, I should have some mastery, right? In my observations by administrators, they say we want to pursue the Distinguished category of the rubric, but nobody ever lives there. Maybe that eliminates some of the pressure I place on myself. And in the years to come, perhaps during one of those observations, someone will kindly tell me when it’s time for me to flit to the next adventure.