The Day of Reckoning
So it's been 3 full weeks of quarantine practices and it's time to take count. I am terribly behind on all my school work. The first 2 weeks I nearly achieved the 'blissful' state of emotional breakdown from trying too hard, but not accomplishing anything.
One of the lessons was, that I am not a school. Also, I can be a teacher, but not the way teachers are. I also realized that best pedagogical approaches are not applied by all teachers, some teachers prefer their rigid ways and there is NOTHING I can do about it unless I want t go to full out war. So I stopped asking for help. I tried forcing homework. I tried waiting until she does it. I tried planning with her how this homeschooling could be working for her. We came up with strategies together. They all failed miserably. And me with them. A total roller coaster of emotions, while my own school work was failing. At one point I told my mom that this is not sustainable, me nagging on her, sitting with her, asking, pleading, punishing and still arriving at the end of the day without her having done even half of what was assigned. I can teach her, but at which cost? By dropping out of my own? I want to study, so I should be studying, instead of trying to convince the one who doesn't want to study, do it.
I understand her, the materials she has from school are BORING. Repetitive boring. Also, she engages with social pressure, and I am not enough social pressure for her. And she is really smart, she can figure out things. Then tonight I thought that maybe I can say Fuck you! to the school and teach her what she needs to know in a more entertaining way. Maths is effing fun when you make it about real life. Her eyes lit up when I told her to calculate the surface of a door so she knows how much paint she will need to recoat it. This gave me hope for the first time in 3 weeks. Perhaps I can make it work without the help of the stupid school?
Another lesson was, that I need to take time for myself specifically, so now I have an hour of yoga every morning and without even batting an eye, I will take a few hours a day to get out of the house. I cannot be super productive, I have about 4-5 hours of very intense work with kids popping in and out, and then I am brain dead. No point in sitting at my computer further and thinking about how I want to kill myself because I can't accomplish all that I wanted to in one sitting. Today I cleaned our old raspberry bush and raked some leaves. It's now prepared to be fertilized and topped up with fresh soil, so that maybe this summer, but surely next year, we will have some nice strong raspberry bushes. Tomorrow it's time to prune the Jasmine and then cherry trees.
The third big lesson was that complaining doesn't help. In order to protect my own sanity, I decided that for the first time in my life, I will allow shortcuts to myself and I will stop trying to do too many things by myself. This realization came like an 'aha!' moment in the middle of a marketing meeting when I just asked if anyone in the group would like to step up and lead the webinars we were planning. And someone did! And I felt so relieved, immediately. I have been loading all sorts of things on my shoulders because I thought I had to do it, being responsible for it and then feeling overloaded with tasks to accomplish.
I'll write about remote working and masks and of my 'public behavior' tomorrow. Now off to bed at nearly 1AM.
