The Raft

Life, like always has been a crazy ride recently. My summer has proved to be both restful and challenging in good ways because of how I am growing. I want to take some time to reflect on this past school and really how my experience of being a new teacher has gone. I had a rough second year of teaching without really any seemingly pinpoint-able cause. I still love my students, even though they were a little more overbearing than I would really have desired many days, there were only 2 days I left the building feeling like I really liked my job. Which is not a good place to be mentally or emotionally, but I just kept chalking it up to being overwhelmed and overfilling my plate. The problem with that was, I felt I actually had better boundaries set from my first year of teaching and actually was doing things completely unrelated to school, so really something else had to be off. Recently someone in my life asked me about why my year was so rough and I gave them the overwhelmed answer. For some reason that particular time I didn’t feel like my answer was quite justifiable, which caused me to do some deeper reflection.

That deeper reflection lead me to this analogy of what teaching has felt like for me. To me teaching is kinda like an art of survival, so I envision living on this raft in the middle of the ocean.

On this raft you have different types of supplies:
1. Survival Supplies – The things you need to stay live, like a water filter so you can drink salt water. I envision these to be things like classroom management, having something for the students to learn from daily, being able to grade things on time. All the things that are the bare bones of having a functioning classroom.
2. Dispensable Supplies – These are things you appreciate and can help improve your quality of life on the raft, but you don’t have too have. Too many extra curriculum resources, ideas of more things the FFA Chapter can do, serving in additional leadership roles. These are all great things; however, they are items on your raft not necessary for survival or a functioning classroom.

Anyone can just drop supplies on your raft when they want, which sometimes can lead to dispensable supplies becoming a distraction or even have you feel obligated to use them, which can become very detrimental when you are first getting adjusted to life on the raft.

Think about it. When you first learn to do a task, it takes you longer to complete. Let’s say it takes 5 hours for you to filter enough water for you to live for a day. You have to use all 5 hours. All of a sudden though, someone drops some dispensable supplies on your raft that you feel obligated to use. Let’s say it’s a book you feel you have to read. The time it takes you to read the book during the day now only leaves you 4 hours to filter your water, but you need 5 to do it right. Now things are not getting done to allow you to live, you aren’t focusing on the book to learn anything because all you can think about is that you need to filter water, and you rush through filtering water, so it takes you longer to perfect the skill.

You never were going to continue to take 5 hours to filter water. The more you did it, the less time it was going to take. If you had solely focused on filtering water, in 3 months time you could have cut it down to 4 hours, then 3, then 2, then 1. Since you got distracted by the dispensable supplies though, it took you 6 months to cut the time down to 4 hours and you didn’t really learn anything from the book. This put you into a never ending cycle of being overwhelmed and trying to do too much at once.

I also think there are stages to the life quality you are in while you live on the raft.

1. The Thriving Phase –
   This is the goal. You have figured out a system that allows you to function well with all of your surviving tasks and you can now use your dispensable supplies to help improve your quality of life (or teaching abilities).
2. The Surviving Phase –
   This is where you start. You are sitting on the raft working making sure you do everything you need too in order to live each day. You don’t have time to really look at a lot of extra stuff or be super creative. Your task at hand is to make it one day at a time.
3. The Drowning Phase –
   This is where something has knocked you off the raft and you are holding on for dear life. You have to focus on things like breathing and keeping your head above water, making concentrating on other survival tasks hard on a lot of days.

My first year teaching, I think I did a good job of staying in survival mode for the most part. Occasionally I felt like I had started to drown or even sometimes thrive. On average though, we survived. Somehow, that summer between year one and year two, I let the dispensable supplies start to take over and I did not spend my summer recharging so I could continue to work my way from survival to thriving. Instead, that summer I let everything shifting around knock me right off that raft so I started year 2 in the drowning phase. This is not where you want to be ever, but especially when part of your job is helping elevate others to their potential. You can’t do that when you have to put everything you have into getting back on the raft. As more dispensable things started to get dropped on the raft, mainly in the form of FFA activities that didn’t happen my first year teaching because of COVID, it felt like these things were constantly knocking at my hands, sometimes causing one to slip or even pushing my head underwater. There were a few times I felt I had almost pulled myself back on the raft to re-enter survival mode, but every time I got close, something else just knocked me back down again.

This summer I knew I would have to make choices that allowed me to recharge, so I can start out year 3 sitting on the raft or before the end of the year there will be no way I am still able to hold on. It’s taken some self-restraint from this work-a-holic, but I have taken time to work on recharging, which for me includes being able to reflect on what made this past year really go so wrong. As I was sitting on a porch swing at my parents house spending some time with Jesus in the sunshine with the morning breeze and my email completely turned off, I began to realize how little I had been doing that lately and how I missed it. It took some more time for me to fully realize how big of a time gap it had been since I really had been intentional about spending time with Jesus everyday.

So this is where I figured out why my school year had really been so rough. I wasn’t just mentally and emotionally burned, I really was spiritually hurting, which impacted everything else in my life. I had stopped spending time with Jesus and pretended I could figure life all out on my own. Pretended somehow I would have the strength to pull myself back on the raft.

I thought I had moved past that independence in my life because of how desperately I needed Jesus to get me through so many things, including year one of teaching, but I was wrong. Somehow I got so caught up in the lip-service of self-care, I didn’t even realize I was slipping. I had all these plans made. I did a self-care group book study over the summer including making all the pretty charts with how I would recharge during the school year by making more time for myself. In a sense I did, but I used it all wrong. Also notice how many times I said I? I reverted back to ways of independence and pretending that I could make the school year better for myself.

Apparently, all the lessons I learned pretty much all the years of my life were thrown out the window and lost on me for this season. I wasn’t doing the things that have always kept me grounded include personal Jesus time (so reading my bible/prayer time), journaling, and playing the piano (how I worship best). If I look at the amount of time spent in my bible in 2021 – very minimal. The number of pages poured into journal (the main way I process anything going on in my life) – 8. Only 8 pages in my journal for 365 days. Yikes! I put on the face I was doing everything right. Not working on Sundays and going to church, working on becoming a part of a community group, sporadically praying for my students. I even had myself fooled into thinking I had it right. But I was missing the basics, that in turn made everything else lip-service. I wasn’t spending my Sunday sabbath reading my bible, I was spending it binge watching Hulu. I wasn’t covering my job in prayer, I was praying for students when I was at my wits end with them.

My first year teaching, I was still doing my best to be in tune with God, knowing I needed his strength to make it through each day, so I spent the school year on the raft and in true relationship with him. Somewhere during the summer, I must of decided I could do everything on my own because I stopped spending time in the word, I wasn’t worshiping (that could be a whole other blog post), I wasn’t journaling/reflecting. And I fell off that raft. Hard.

So as I sit here and reflect on what all this really means and how I can use it to grow going forward, my prayer as I start preparing for Year 3 – where ever it takes me – and for all of you is that we don’t get so wrapped up in ourselves that we fall off the raft from forgetting how much we need sweet moments with Jesus – Every. Single. Day.

Not everything from year 2 was bad, just hard. I have many fond memories and truly do love my students. Here are some photos to help bring those moments to my mind: