Sabbath and work

What is the Sabbath? In the Bible, God rested on the seventh day from His work of creation and made that day holy. He named it the Sabbath, and commanded His followers to honor it and keep it holy as well. Lately, I've been interested in finding out what exactly that means and also what it looks like in real life. This lead me to order a book on my Kindle called "Ancient Practices: Sabbath." Honestly, so far it seems like a lot of fluff. It's very idealistic, which I normally like, but some of it I just can't seem to wrap my brain around. The author talks about how Sabbath is meant for playtime; basically to enjoy God in whatever activities you do that day. It talks about how a true Sabbath can really order our weeks around it. The three days afterward you feel refreshed and the three days prior you anticipate taking a Sabbath again. Personally, I like the aspect of not doing any work on the Sabbath, even though that seems impossible at times to uphold. What does it mean to 'play' as an adult though I wonder? Does it simply mean to do that which you love and makes you come alive? That seems like a good definition to me. Some people really enjoy hiking in the mountains. Would that be considered as work, though? I don't really think so, unless you're coming from a legalistic standpoint on it.

A while back, I was in correspondence with someone over an upcoming mission trip that I was scheduled to go on in the summer. Whenever I emailed her with questions, she'd faithfully write back and her sign off was always, "Enjoy God," and then her name. Personally, I always enjoyed reading those signatures from her as it was a good reminder that we don't serve God out of obligation but rather from a place of joy and contentment. This isn't always the case, obviously, we need to worship Him even in the midst of suffering. Ultimately, though, our praise stems from joy more often than not. Joy is not to be confused with happiness either; although it's my personal belief that if you are pursuing joy than you will have more happiness as a natural consequence as well. When I think of joy, specifically joy found in the Lord, I think of contentment. Being content no matter what circumstances you find yourself in is a discipline that is built over a lifetime. The apostle Paul had a really good grasp on it, one that I can only hope to attain one day. For myself, though, I find it really hard to stay content when my world is falling apart. When I'm in the throes of depression, for instance, or when my job is so overwhelming that I can't even see straight. That's when I have to say a special prayer and beg God to find contentment in the midst of my circumstances.

Speaking of work, we have just been given all this stuff about RTI, response to intervention. Now, the plus side of this coin is that we're focusing on meeting students' needs, which is always a good thing. Most teachers were doing this anyways. Now, however, we're supposed to document everything we're doing. This leads to an excessive amount of paperwork. Paperwork has never been my strong suit nor has organization in general so I'm starting to learn how to deal with it. It's a new learning curve, as are a lot of things within the field of education, so I'm slowly finding my footing along the way.

It is my desire to be the best teacher I can be, as cheesy and cliche as that sounds. My plan is to probe the minds of some of the best teachers at my school and to read more literature in the field of education. "The Daily 5" is a book I've picked up for a second time. There's a lot of stuff within it about best practices based on research. The hard part about it is that we're supposed to follow this curriculum that doesn't really allow time for the freedom needed to implement the Daily 5. As a result, I'm looking for ways to implement best practices along with my curriculum that we're mandated to do. I'm really tempted to just do away with my curriculum and go solely with the daily 5 due to it being based on research and best practices. It would seem obvious for our school district or at least our school to go with best practices but this is simply not the case. I have a feeling there's politics involved somewhere along the way of purchasing curriculum from different providers since we do this every 6 years.

Constantly changing has its pros and cons, to be sure. I've been at my school now for 6 years and change and have moved grade levels 4 times. It makes it difficult to become a master at any one grade level. Hopefully, I'll get to stay in kindergarten next year since I still don't feel like I even have my feet under me at this point. I never thought I would actually enjoy kindergarten, but I have loved it so far. The newness has worn off a little, and admittedly I do sometimes long for the times past when I taught 5th grade and the students were all independent. It never even occurred to me that students don't start out as independent. Boy was I ever wrong! Independence is a skill that is taught, and one I'm trying desperately to teach to my kindergarten students as the year progresses.

Last month, I ended up dropping out of grad school, for the second time in my life. Somehow, I get this notion that I'll suddenly be organized and efficient enough with time management that I can take on grad school no problem. This time I dropped not because of the time management part but rather because it was cutting into my goal of saving an emergency fund of 3-6 months. I'd like to do this as quickly as possible and I was finding that extremely difficult with $400 leaving my pocket every month. In our in boxes at school we're constantly sent emails that have grad schools advertisements. One of them said you can get loan forgiveness for grad school if you work at a Title 1 school. That has extreme appeal to me since I happen to work at a Title 1 school. It's something to look into at least. Who knows what the future holds though, I may not end up teaching there for the rest of my career like I think I want to at this point. There may come a day where I want to teach overseas or at least try it for a year or two. For now, though, I love living here in Sarasota and being close to all my friends who live here.