Profound Thoughts, Maybe

I feel obligated to write today and say something incredibly profound. Now is the perfect time for profound, reflective thoughts. I have cleaned my room, said good-bye to the last few students for this year, officially accepted my job offer at this school, and I am merely sitting at my desk with nothing but summer projects to do, waiting for the administrators to tell me I can go home, which won’t happen for another few hours. I have survived my first year of teaching. I am no longer a “first year” teacher. Now is the perfect time to fill in this empty blog space with all sorts of profound thoughts about teaching, how I’ve grown as a teacher and as a person over the year, and other such reflective topics. However, I don’t really have anything to say. I did learn a lot about teaching, and I did grow a nearly unchartable amount as a teacher and a decent amount as a human being over the past few months, but I don’t have any profound thoughts to offer all the people who keep asking me what my final thoughts on the year are. I guess the closest I could come is to say that, after nine months of school, I like teaching. That’s pretty profound, but only to other people who have spent time after school or during classes wondering if this is really what they want to be doing with their lives. I don’t know about the rest of my life, or the next five years, or any such far away lengths of time, but now, today, I like teaching. I’m excited for next year.

Perhaps the real reason I have nothing more profound and earth-shattering to say than “um.. I like teaching?” is because I haven’t been reflecting on the past year for the past few months. I’ve been gearing up for the future. I have a million plans for my summer, and a million hopes and dreams and challenges being thrown at me next year. As an added incentive to forward thinking, my future has been up in the air nearly constantly over the past few months, and, now that I finally know better what it will look like, I am surveying it with great interest.

And I’m determined to make this summer awesome. For the past nine months, it has often been an all-consuming task just to keep up. A common thought pattern was: “I can’t do __________ because I don’t have time, or energy for that matter.” It’s a fair argument to make that I might not have done _________ anyway, being naturally lazy and often inclined to say that learning new things takes too much effort. Now, things have eased up, and summer is stretching before me. I am determined not to let my natural laziness or summer lethargy find my summer over before it’s begun in August. I am planning to make things happen. I will get back into climbing. I am learning to skateboard. I will bike lots of miles to beautiful places. I will learn new songs on the guitar. I will spend lazy moments in the park. I will cook fantastic food. I will put miles of roadtrips on my car to see things I haven’t seen yet. I will stay up late talking; I will get up early to see the sunrise.

In short, I am resolved to let neither fear nor laziness stop me this summer.