Apologies

It has been brought to my attention that one of my current 102 students has stumbled upon this personal blog of mine and was concerned with a statement which remarked that I feel inadequate with certain areas of my life right now, including my 102 class. This discovery was in part my fault. For whatever reason, my computer defaults a section for blog comments with this website, which it did on the blog for my 102 class. I try diligently to erase it each time I post, but sometimes I forget. Well, I forgot once or twice.

Regardless of the fact that I feel as though this was an inappropriate boundary to breach in a student/teacher relationship where I value some personal distance, I recognize that my writings here are public and therefore accessible to anyone and for that cannot hold a grudge. Plus, it was my own fault for not watching my computer's lovely defaults better. I would like to apologize to that student - and any other student who read that post - for the misunderstanding that arose from reading that blog post. Yes, I did express concern with myself and my own responsibilities, but that post was hardly more than a personal, hyperbolic rant. I take it for granted, I think, that the majority of people who read this - about seven total in the world - are close friends and family members who speak to me on a steady basis and are privy to my propensity to vent negative bothers and exaggerate on my personal blog.

In actuality, I feel that my life is quite balanced between home, school, work, work, and work. One reason I perhaps feel that I don't give as much time to my 102 class as I should is because I don't give as much to it as I have in the past. This is because I wrote daily lesson plans and set course expectations during winter break this year rather than working on it throughout the semester, leaving for me only the task of adding to lessons or altering things along the way. This has proven to work rather successfully for me, and has helped me grow in the art of unit planning and coordination and has alleviated my constant time commitments in the copy room and late nights at my computer trying to come up with an idea of what to do next. Also, as I mentioned, I'm unable to return emails during the day and often either don't want to sit at a computer or have no time to sit at a computer in the evenings. I generally try to maintain a 24-hour return on emails, but this semester, admittedly, it has taken me longer - sometimes up to three days, which, although a disappointment to me at times, has not yet seemingly been a problem with my students. If it has, they have not voiced that, and since they also have my cell phone number, they have more than one venue for doing so.

And so, I apologize for having a rough time and feeling comfortable enough to put that mildly on public display. My heart is in fact in all that I do and I often find it mostly in my 102 students. I do honestly worry about neglecting them, but I am coming to learn that that's a general fear of many teachers. I look forward to every Saturday class this semester and helping welcome a classroom full of bright and interesting adults to the world of college writing. Working as a graduate assistant over the previous two years has increased my awareness like I had never imagined it could to the world of education, authorship and community connectedness. I fear that leaving it at the end of the semester will leave me with a certain void in my life that could never be filled with ninth graders. I value the college courses I teach for their openness, their willingness, their insight and, obviously, their lack of behavioral concerns. They are a place where I can share, intellectualize and challenge in a way that I can't in other avenues of my life. I view my 102 class this semester, in particular, nostalgically for that reason: it will be my last. I think it is this reason as well that drives me to succeed with them, to help them more than I've helped the others, to do more than a superhuman teacher could do. But alas, since I am not superhuman, I must live with what I am capable of: one day a week, pre-planned lessons, sometimes late emails, and all the gusto I can gather.