"Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit' yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'”
- James 4:13-15
As teachers, we make a lot of plans. This is a good thing. Teachers who go into the classroom every day and wing it do a disservice to their students. We must plan the day, the week, the quarter, and the semester (while still remaining flexible), or we will never teach our students as well as we could. As a yearbook teacher, I have to plan photography schedules (from classes to athletics to artistic events), and I must teach students to plan for the meeting of deadlines.
There is perhaps no day of my year that is more planned out than the day we distribute the yearbook. This was how it was supposed to go this year:
- The weekend before, the yearbooks are sorted into grades and labeled with student names.
- The day of distribution, I have a substitute. I arrive at school 6AM to get everything I will need for the day out of my classroom before the students start arriving at 7:45.
- We distribute our books from several locations to ease traffic congestion, so I move boxes on a hand truck to different rooms. At least one of those rooms also has AP exams going on in the morning, so I try to get as much done in there as I can before they get started and then work as quietly as I can afterward.
- My school has two campuses, so when I have finished setting up in one place, I drive boxes of elementary students' books to our other campus, unload them, and deliver them to classrooms for the teachers to distribute as it works into their day.
- I then go back up to my campus to prepare for our distribution event, a pep rally celebrating the Fine Arts programs of our school.
- The final part of the rally is the reveal of the dedication of yearbook.
- The remainder of the day is yearbook signing time.
That's what was planned, but this day certainly didn't turn out the way I had planned. The first few items went as planned, but when I got to the elementary campus, I was getting far more tired and weak than usual. One of our maintenance crew helped me load the books into the lobby. When I went to park the car, I felt a little sick. I went to the bathroom and threw up. You know how weak and shaky you are after that, so there was no way I was going to be able to deliver boxes to classrooms. I went to the front desk and suggested a change of plan. Our receptionists said, "You look terrible," gave me a bottle of water, and let me sit in the corner for a few minutes.
For some reason, all I wanted to was to get back up to my own campus. I can't really explain that except that is the same feeling you get when you just want to be home. Had it been any other day, I would have gone home at that point. That's my only go-home rule: You vomit; you leave. But I really didn't want that to happen on this day. There's a Walgreens next door to my campus, so I decided some caffeine might be helpful. I bought a drink, and as soon as I got back in my car, it started again. People of Walgreens, I apologize if I scared any potential customers away while leaning out of my car, vomiting in your parking lot. I really couldn't help it.
Since I wasn't delivering boxes to classrooms, I had an extra 90 minutes or so to attempt recovery. I wanted someone to know what was happening, so I went to our art teacher and told her I would be in my car and to come and check on me if she didn't see me by noon. Then, I had an experience I've never had before - napping at work. It took a while to figure out how to recline the driver's seat (why is that even a thing?) and get into a reasonably comfortable position. I slept for about 45 minutes, woke up feeling like a human being again, looked in the mirror to see that I was a human color again (I had been the green of a Mt. Dew bottle before), and continued with the events of the day.
I believe you should reflect and learn something when things don't go as planned, so here's what I learned.
1. I may not be as necessary to the process as I previously thought. All the yearbooks were distributed, despite my illness.
2. Sometimes, you have ask for help. I would have rather had no one know what was happening, but it simply wasn't possible. People rallied and took over what I couldn't do.
3. Even when you don't have the day you planned, things turn out okay. Some even told me the next day that they thought it went better than ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment