So, today, I called in.  If you have a traditional corporate-type job, this probably doesn’t strike you as anything worth sharing, but I am a teacher.  And my fellow teachers can attest, calling in as a teacher is a big deal.  First off, sub plans are such a pain to write , and second, we feel this sort of moral obligation to never be sick–to never miss a day because our students need to learn, and I, for one, will drag myself into work on death’s door because I feel guilty if I’m not there.  There’s always something coming up–a concert, an assessment, a meeting I can’t miss, etc. etc. etc.

But I called in today.  And I didn’t do it because I was sick (of body, anyway,) but because emotionally and mentally, I have nothing left in me.  My house was in desperate need of a good cleaning.  I have laundry that needs to be done before I go out of town this weekend. I have to get my oil changed. I needed to actually cook something, because a girl cannot live on tortilla chips alone.  And I was so frustrated by the end of work yesterday, I just didn’t really like anyone or anything.  So that’s what I’m doing today.  All these chores.  Little dumb errands.  Not talking to anyone.  Having my faith in my profession and humanity in general restored.  De-stressing.

If you had told 19 year-old me that I would ever consider doing laundry and cleaning a bathroom “de-stressing,” I would have told you that you were insane.

And that got me thinking.  We are all like this.  My colleagues.  Friends in other districts.  Friends who teach in other states.  Friends who teach in other countries.  We are all, always, stressed.  Every teacher I know seems to function in this constant cloud of stress and pressure.  Some of it’s external, put on us by districts and parents and society.  We are required, now, to teach more content at a faster pace to more children while additionally teaching the character and ethics and social behavior that was once the realm of families and homes.  We are under pressure to get our test scores up (or keep them up.)  We are pushed to be a part of more committees and teams and collaborations and professional learning communities.  There are learning plans and development models and new curricula and a thousand other things.

But it’s not just “them.”  It’s also “us.”  Speaking for myself (but a pattern that I’ve seen time and time again from my fellow educators), I feel like I need to constantly prove myself to the society around me that doesn’t know what happens everyday in my classroom and believes that my job is “easy” and that I “don’t really work.”  I am always working to prove them wrong.  (Our district extended the teacher work day to 8.5 hours because the superintendent didn’t want parents to see us leaving the building, because they would think we “don’t work.”  No joke.)  But that’s just part of it.  I believe in what I’m doing.  I believe education matters.  I love my subject area and I want to help my kids love it as much as I do.  I believe that for many kids, I and other teachers are the only adult connection they have–we are the only adults that are not playing on our smart phones while we talk to them.  I want to be a better teacher.  I want to help them grow as people and students.  I want them to succeed.

And all of this stress is exhausting.

There is something wrong with my life if, at the end of the week, all I’m up to by the time I get to Saturday is binge watching something on Netflix while I obsessively crochet a blanket, rather than doing the usual Saturday chores and errands.  There is something seriously wrong with me when I don’t want to see people or do anything social ever because I have given every single atom of people-skill to my students.    Something is wrong here.

And we can all talk about how it’s society’s fault, or our administration’s fault, or whatever, and I agree, that’s a huge part of it.  But I can’t control that.  I can control me.  As I’ve been cleaning this morning, I thought about that.

I need to accept my humanity.  I can only teach the best I can.  I cannot do everything–even if something is good for kids, I cannot do all of the good things for kids. I am not God.  I cannot save these kids.  I have to do a little bit less if I am going to survive in a career in education.  I have to do what I can do, but also be okay with knowing when it’s time to stop.  Because when I don’t stop, when I am everything to everybody, I lose myself.  I don’t have the energy for being “Emily,” because it gets lost in the sea of “Miss D.”  I am not the only person in these lives that walk through my door.  I can’t be.  All these kiddos have families, parents, churches, clubs, and other people who are also have a hand in raising them. I admit, this is a hard pill to swallow.  I know a lot of you teachers reading this are thinking how wrong I am.  And maybe you can do it.  You can teach and be the perfect made-for-T.V. movie teacher and still go home at the end of the night and have a spouse and children and dog, and volunteer at church and run twelve miles a night…and if that’s you, I’m impressed.  I wish I could be you.  But I’m learning that I can’t.  I have to “make cuts” to be a better teacher, to make sure I don’t end up here repeatedly–taking sick days to clean my bathroom.

And for all of you in my boat, I’d encourage you to take a step.  Leave something less-than-perfect.  Go home.  Make dinner.  Breathe.

So, my choir kids had a concert today.  It’s a big deal.  First of all, because we are still a baby program (when I took over two years ago, the program had a membership of twelve kids), so anytime we manage to pull anything off, people are still kind of surprised.  But, more importantly, because I teach middle school so literally EVERYTHING is a big deal.  My fellow M.S. educators know where I’m coming from.  Just watch the greeting ritual of two seventh grade girls who haven’t seen each other in ten minutes–let’s just say there is a lot of squealing and hugging.  You’d think one of them had literally just come back from the dead.

It felt like an accomplishment to me, too.  I have high standards, and (unlike my colleagues) I understand where a middle school choral program should be.  I look at where we are and can only think of how far we have to go.  There is so much they don’t know.  In so many ways, I am sending kids unprepared for high school choral programs out of my program.  We have such a long road ahead!  It is easy to be overwhelmed by what is undone, how many times I feel like I’m failing them as their teacher and not doing the job as well as I would like to because of the simple fact that I am a One doing the job of Two.

I feel the constant pressure from my students to sing music they already know.  (Not sometimes.  Literally ALL THE TIME.)  Middle schoolers, unlike their high school counterparts, have very little interest in trying new things.  They want to do what they know.  If they don’t know it, well, then just forget it.  It’s probably garbage, as far as they’re concerned.  So doing the music that I know is best for them is the musical equivalent of trying to convince your average six year old to eat spinach.  It is a losing battle.

But there are victories, small ones, when I force feed them enough real choral music that they actually hear the potential that is there–how what sounds best in a choir is not what sounds best on the radio.  My 8th grade girls choir is in the middle of an Epiphany Month.  Every few days, it’s like a new light bulb comes on, and they become a little bit more like the choral singers I hope they will be.

After our concert today, they showed up for class ready to watch a movie.  “Nice try,” said I, their mean, cruel and generally nasty director, “We only have two months until our last concert.  We have work to do.”  They groused.  I preened their egos about their great job a bit, and then I let them choose between two different (non-pop) pieces.  The one they picked (which I really hoped they would) is lush and full and truly choral.   We listened to a recording, and at the moment in the music where I first fell in love with the piece, one of my girls breathes, “Oh, this is awesome.”  Little tittering whispers around the choir, as they write on scraps of paper which song they want to do.  The vote is so far in favor of The Lass from the Low Countree I don’t even have to bother to properly count.

My school has a strong minority representation–which is really cool, because there is a richness in having so many different backgrounds in my classroom.  I have had many (administrators, mostly) who don’t know music well, who insist that choral music doesn’t have a place in culturally responsive education.  I point out that Mozart is just as foreign to my Caucasian students as Spirituals are to my African-American students–both are important, and both help make them better performers.  (I site candy–eat too much candy, your teeth will fall out and you will get sick.  Too much pop music makes it hard to breed a good and healthy young singer. But this is a soap box for another day…)  

Anyway, so we are doing a choral arrangement of a piece from Mozart’s opera, “The Magic Flute,” titled Papageno-Papagena.  You don’t need to know about it, really (but it’s an awesome piece, in my unbiased opinion…), but you just have to know it’s Mozart.  It was written by some Austrian guy over 200 years ago.  It is light years away from my 8th grade choir and their American ideas and smart phones and instant gratification culture.

But we worked on it today, because I’m “mean” and expect them to sing in choir, like, all the time.  (The nerve, I mean, really…) But we started going, and guess what?  Lo, and behold, it sounded pretty good.  “Why?” you ask.  “Because Mozart wrote music for real, human voices without any digital help,” say I.  Well, that and because my girls are finally starting to listen to one another and are singing as an ensemble, rather than a bunch of soloists all singing at the same time.  They are finally beginning to make music.

We finish the section–at the same time, in the right key.

One of my girls, “Aria,” does a quick improve dance off of the dab.  “Awww, yeah,” she says, “This be lit!”

You heard it here first, folks.  Just remember, the next time you hear a piece by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart…he may be a lot of things, but for some Midwestern, middle school singers, he be lit!

I have a student who we’ll call “Jordan.”  Jordan is a sixth grader who began our relationship by walking up to me the first day of choir and informing me that he “hated singing” and “didn’t like music.”  I talked him into waiting two weeks before he quit.  He told me that was fine, but he was still going to be out of there as soon as he could.

Let me try to build you a visual of Jordan.  He’s as cute as a bug’s ear, a little pip-squeak of a kid whose voice change and growth spurt are nowhere in sight.  (As a choir teacher, one comes to think of puberty strictly in terms of the effects it has on the human voice and how many part threes one’s likely to have by June.)  If he were an animal, he’d be a squirrel–cute and likable with a certain manic energy than can overwhelm you if you’re not ready for it.  He can be frustrating, but I just can’t stay mad at him for long because he’s so earnest and hard-working and he’s so darned cute.

Obviously, Jordan never quit choir.  In fact, he is one of my choir officers now and one of my “specials”–the kids with whom you feel that special, Teacher-Student bond.

Hanging on my wall, I have a Darth Vader he made me out of those little plastic beads you melt together with an iron.  He hangs around at the end of class to talk to me.  He tells me about how he leveled up in his favorite video game.  (I understand zero percent of what he’s talking about, but I listen and congratulate him, anyway.)  He asks me about what he should do if a girl likes him, what should he do to tell her he doesn’t like her because he likes someone else?  He tells me about he’s going to see The Force Awakens for the fifth time.  And today, out of the clear blue sky, in the middle of a conversation about how his mom is “making him do X” because she is a good mom, and that’s what moms do, he says, “Well, my first mom wasn’t doing a good job.  That’s why I have my new mom now.”

“Oh,” I say, not quite prepared, as so often is the case with kids, for the suddenly deep water we’re treading.  “I didn’t know you were adopted.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’m glad you have a good mom now.”

“My brothers and sisters weren’t doing good things, either.  That’s why they live so far away.”  Far away, I later find out, is Oregon.  I don’t ask what he means by “not good things.”

“So, how old were you when you were adopted?” I ask, figuring he must have been four or five, since he clearly has some memories of his biological mother.

“I got adopted when I was eleven.  That’s why I moved to Wisconsin.”

My heart hurts for this little guy, always so earnest and excited for class, trying hard to follow the rules of the rehearsal and expects them of the people around him.

“Is that weird for you sometimes?” I ask.

He shrugs, “A little.  It was kind of weird because my mom, I used to call her ‘Tracy,’ but now I just call her ‘Mom.'”

He doesn’t elaborate further, and two minutes later, he’s pestering me to get him a frappe at McDonald’s as I write him a pass to his next class, telling me all about how his sister in Oregon bought him a new video game that is in the mail, Miss Donaldson, and it’s killing him because he has to wait for it to get here.  He’s told me what he wants me to know, and now he can move on, as he bounces out my door and down the hall.

As I listen to the door close behind him, I pause.  As a teacher, I can check the records and could probably have figured out Jordan’s history, but that’s not the same as having a student confide it in you.  I think one of the reasons I like Jordan so much is because he is a student who really needs me, the way my overseas students did, and in a way my American students do not.  He needs me to listen.  He needs me to know he’s adopted.  He wants me to tell him he can do it, that he shouldn’t give up.  He wants me to be part of his little life.

And I know that is a gift.