Life is what happens to you while you're busy doing other things

I am thankful for the sunshine and the frost.
I am thankful that I get to spend my morning, on a Tuesday, meandering around a Lake, in a wooded wonderland mostly devoid of people.
I am thankful for all the sundry missteps, wrong turns, and all the weaving winding more than U turns that my life has given me.
It's the reason that I'm substitute teaching now. After over a decade, I still haven't found my place in the world nor a classroom that fits me. But I'm ok with that because my journey has given me some glorious missteps, like this morning, and Japan.

Because I failed kindergarten, but not 4th grade, I graduated from college with my teaching license in the middle of the year. Because I graduated in the middle of the year, I had the time to reflect, and play and consider an adventure teaching English in Japan. I returned and spent a horrible year teaching in a school run like a prison in the North side of Minneapolis. Because I had a horrible year in horrible school run like a prison, I became interested in character education. How can we teach students to be peaceful, kind, and caring? And then I learned about politics. And then I learned about No Child Left Behind, and "Adequate Yearly Progress" and an American Public School system so obsessed with quantifying learning that no learning goes on. I became part of a system of charter schools in which more scrutiny is given to your written lesson plans than to the actual education of that lesson in the classroom. The non-charter big district public schools don't even LOOK at your lesson plans more than twice a year but they've got their own obsessions. Everything is about "initiatives" and curriculum so locked up that children have no room left to discover anything for themselves.

I am hoping, that in my next life, as a Montessori teacher, things will go better. There will be no grades and there will be no coercion. Freedom, WITH responsibility. Students will teach themselves using carefully selected materials. I will be not a "teacher" but a guide. Because when is education really something that is "done to you." Education and growth is the result of experience. Occasionally books read and written assignments completed but more often than not the sum of our thoughts and senses leading us to discoveries that impact our brain and heart and will.


We are travelers, my partner and I. We do not stay in one place for forty years like our peers if it does not suit us. We do not reminisce about High School victories or neighborhoods that have growth like moss about our soldiers. We make new friends, keep the old, but we continue to grow.

Two years in Europe, and then on with the journey!