I’m disappointed in myself. My spine might have turned to jelly, my teaching pedagogy might have changed to getting by, status quo, hiding. No one watches me teach. No one coaches me. No one holds me accountable. No one knows any different.

I’m getting lazy. Lazy is a word I’ve adamantly ignored because I feel there is a very incredibly damagingly negative connotation, and it’s usually misused.

Maybe I forgive too easily, maybe I make too many excuses, but I think very, very few people are genuinely LAZY. They are stuck, they are emotionally messy, they are unbelieving that they can complete the task at hand. Rarely lazy. Mostly fearful.

But I’m lazy. I know better, I expect more, I am capable of more, I am scared of I’ve turned myself into and perhaps more scared of why. I don’t run. I do the minimum at school. I eat poorly. I drink constant caffeine and my body feels bloated and useless. I’m a mess, pretty much.

This is part of what’s stopped my updates. The laziness, and mores the embarrassment that comes as a result. Bigger than that: this is my Third year. I’m TFA-grown and by golly, I should know better. I should do better. I should be better than a first or second year teacher because regardless of anything else I’ve been here longer and I know what it means to work hard and I know what it means to have high expectations and I expect myself to have them.

Until I lose motivation. Or accountability. Or anyone around me that has the time or energy to point out I’ve stopped working as hard. To call me lazy.

Third year TFA means No Longer TFA means Good Luck and Have Fun Feeling Alienated because if you’re not on staff and not a corps member, well, then you’re a teacher. You should have figured it out by now.

This makes me fear the fourth year. I simultaneously very much want to plan and don’t want to plan at all. Facing failure, again, is scary. Keep me where I’m safe and dry and hidden! Keep praising me for Staying A Fourth Year because no one Really wants to stay here, do they.

Well, yes, sometimes.

I love my community for my community, not for TFA, not for proving a point, not for being a martyr or earning incredulous and totally uninformed compliments. I love being here and I know there are other teachers who love being here, too, but if people wonder why it’s so hard to stay, why so many TFAers leave so quick: this is why. The support runs out. The well runs dry. Or as I’ve said 800 times in the past three months: you hit the ceiling. It seems the only people who can help develop alumni are entirely (and rightfully, in the sense of a job) dedicated to the current corps. The rest of us, they figure, MUST be doing SOMETHING right or we wouldn’t have stayed that this or fourth year, right? We’ll be fine.

And yes, we will be fine. We always are. But what about our kids?

It’s the end of year three and despite a mostly clean bedroom, despite the kaleidoscope sunlight dancing on my bed, despite long hair and big plans and so many things that push me up today I feel low.

I’ve written more than one post, a few half-complete, one eaten by the surprise computer attack, and none posted because life keeps coming up before computers. I miss writing. I miss chronicling.

Today I came home and crawled into bed, stayed alert to the texts and phone calls I have about this year’s talent show and continue feeling conflicted about everything. I can’t cut out some concise picture of life right now, so again, sadly, I’ll consolodate with bullets mostly for the sake of recording. Hopefully consistent posts will show up again sometime soon.

• Two weeks ago we had a BB gun shooting at school. It was a pretty big deal, and created a stir in the community, and put us on local news twice in a week. It made teaching difficult from a psychological perspective– a sad time.
• Someone I care about was hospitalized for a week for fear that a suicide attempt. I find it interesting that while my best friends were literally attempting suicide while I was in high school and college I could thick skin myself out of being too distraught about it. This person, though, brought me to tears with just a note saying it’s been contemplated. Funny what maturity brings.
• I feel, maybe selfishly and maybe falsely, that I am giving a lot. In many circumstances. To the point where I feel I am continuing to do this and feeling slightly more bitter about it each time, but these things I’m “giving” have a quickly depreciating value and I can’t fix the quality. I am trying to have a strong output, to stay refreshed and motivated and happy, but instead I am grinding metal against concrete, I am pushing with nothing but air I am falling shorter and shorter each time.
• My biggest complaint of recent times is that I feel I have little help, and little confidence. I whine about it but today the sixth grade team had everything taken care of, and I found myself in a surprising (and worrisome) backseat at a meeting. I was so grateful because the talent show and my personal life have been taking everything out of me (but I’m embarrassed to say that because of the results of both). But I feel like a perpetual failure lately. The culture in my classroom is often horrific. My lessons have hardly existed the past few weeks. My summer hangs over my head, a dangling tantalizing treat, but just past that is a class of kids. Kids I’m ignoring because I’m so focused on something I want and can’t yet have. It is excruciating.

Most of this, today, is coming from a lack of sleep. It’s unfortunate that the days I actually post are the days I am feeling the weakest. This year has been wonderful, and I’m excited for next year, but right now I just want to sleep.

Again, I find myself in the Broadway Starbucks of Little Rock. Thinking about what life this summer could look like if I lived here, thinking about how I can lift myself up, thinking about the world at large and how we operate within it.

I have a journal open in front of me, a letter from one of Leaf’s Nola students beside me, and this blog open. Words define my existence, literally and figuratively. I can find no solace stronger than writing a sentence, paragraph, page (though running is a close second).

It’s beautiful outside. Absolutely gorgeous and not yet too hot. Everyone in here is working with some kind of literature. The boy with the Oxford t-shirt outside is reading The Kite Runner. The older couple at the side table is toying with America in Ruins and a laptop. I am so comfortable in coffee shops. This is something I’d never think twice about, but today seems profound.

The last few months, the last year, have surprised me with the lessons I’ve learned. One in weight, and one in identity.

Weight/Wait

So far, I’ve been shaped and made conscious decisions to live my life in service. It’s a cliche I can’t escape lately– the elementary way I’m labeling my choices, at least for now. I want humans, and my nation, and my world, to be better than it is. I want children to know their worth and opportunities, I want my state to have a better reputation (I want my own father to come to Arkansas and not feel compelled to say, “Well I knew this stuff existed, but I didn’t expect it in Arkansas…” –though he LOVED his time here, he is like the huge majority of Americans, especially northern Americans, who don’t understand my home.)

That being said, I’m a pusher. I am a social human. I am a worker and a planner. I am educated and crave learning and understanding. I love culture and the earth and understanding why things happen.

Potentially more than that, I love watching growth in others. I love planting seeds and waiting with a prayer on my lips and a jump in my heart for flowers to bloom and smiles to spread and confidence to leap. I thrive on it. I revel in it. I wish I was better at making it happen (please remember loving these things does not mean I am at all competent at making them happen).

Here’s the weight. Here’s the wait.

People come to decisions and actions on their own terms. We reason, we weigh, we make choices. In every situation, I firmly believe, someone is rooting for you. Rooting for the “right” choice, for the higher chance of happiness, for the more productive long term existence. But that doesn’t come close to guaranteeing people will make that choice. This is a hard lesson to learn when you’re the cheerleader.

I feel I spent a lot of this year with my students, personal life, and myself waiting. In October I proclaimed this would be a lesson in patience and it has been– but not at all in the way I expected. With the wait came weight, and as I whispered to myself that all this patience was for a cause, that all this time and effort and energy was service, the weight didn’t let up. It was patience for a failure. It was eternally pushing up against a surface that you expected to be lifting… then instead finding you’ve buried yourself in the ground.

I have learned a lesson in patience, yes. That I am capable of it and that it sometimes bears the most precious things. But also that patience is sometimes for naught, and that you can’t ignore yourself in its name.

Identity

With this wait/weight came this other, strange thing that I honestly haven’t seen socially in a while: insecurity.

I remember taking a bible personality test in high school and learning that my gift is discernment which, generally, is being able to tell right from wrong. For all of eternity I have been the friend that hates doing anything remotely illegal, the one that follows rules and then makes more of them for fun, that thrives in structure and purpose, that doesn’t ever displace integrity.

But, with this press for patience, I found myself doing just that. Making excuses for what I knew to be wrong– for myself personally, if not for a good greater than that. Where my steadfastness (is that a word?) went, I haven’t a clue. Into a need for affirmation, maybe. Into a craving to fit in (is this junior high?) Into the trap that this is the Delta, and people just take a little longer to come around.

After two and a half years here, being 25 and a tiny bit deeper into my adult life than most of my closest friends, I feel somewhat responsible for knowing what I’m doing and who I am. By now, I expect myself to have thicker skin and a more solid spine. My decision to move to Arkansas was not to compromise my values and ideals. I knew it would be hard, I knew it would be foreign, I knew growing pains would pull and ache in all ways. I just somehow overlooked that those growing pains wouldn’t stop when my TFA commitment did.

***

There are so many other things to write about, but today is a day that I cannot get out of my own head. There are so many literary parallels that my head is swimming (spring is renewal; change is growth; with pain is character…) but I feel so much better to have this out.

Other updates:

• My dad took his first trip to the Delta and fell in love. The most telling moment for me personally was yesterday. One group of friends that had already met him was talking to a group that hadn’t yet. The latter asked, “Have you met her dad? What’s he like?” And the former said, “He’s just like an adult male version of Caroline!” I never noticed how alike we are until this weekend.
• We had another round of talent show auditions last week and 22 acts stayed after school to audition. We had so many my 7th graders had to make cuts!! What!
• I’m being offered, slowly, incremental leadership positions in school. I’ve been thinking about what to take and why, how I want to shape my career in Dumas and why, and how long I truly want to stay in this district.
• There is a program called The Arkansas Teachers Corps that’s just getting its feet on the ground. I’ve been in touch with some coordinators and will potentially work for them this summer. I’m super pumped at how similar it is to TFA, but is its own organization. Because it’s in its infancy, taking a low-pay summer job now could help build me up to other opportunities later on. Also, huge perk: it might house me in Little Rock for six weeks this summer. SOCIAL LIFE, HELLO!!!

And last, funny that it’s a side note but: turned in my letter of intent to stay in Dumas for a fourth year.

• I finished my second grad class of my master’s in ed leadership, a finance class. Glory be. I enjoyed it, but this on-line jazz gets me crazy because I consistently miss deadlines and confuse calendars and don’t check any grades until the very end.
• One of my classes met their writing goal square one, and two are in spitting distance, and two are taking their last exam Thursday. All of them are invested in improvement, at least for this week. They worked incredibly hard on their last essay.
• State testing is next week, Tuesday through Friday. Someone thought it was a good idea to do two straight hours of reading testing, four 30 minute tests, for all 6th graders in the state. HAS THAT PERSON EVER DONE THAT AS AN ADULT AND THOUGHT IT WAS FEASIBLE?! THEY ARE IN THE SIXTH GRADE AND 11 YEARS OLD AND THAT IS RIDICULOUS. I hope my kiddos do okay. I have a personal goal for growth between my years teaching here, but with the overwhelming problems with discipline I wouldn’t be surprised if I flatline between years two and three. I am nervous.
• The talent show is a mess and I don’t like thinking about it, but remembering last year makes me push through. And my seventh graders, just like they did in sixth grade, won’t let me let it go. They show up every week, have tons of ideas and enthusiasm, and love spending time in my room. If nothing else, their attitudes soften my heart and brighten my days.
• Gay marriage still is an issue. Seriously, world? Seriously? Listen to Macklemore. Hide your kids. Hide your wife. Then get over it and let people be themselves.
• I’m reading Ruby Payne’s A Framework for Understanding Poverty and I’m glad I am. Been a long time coming.
• I think I am staying in Dumas a fourth year. Part of me really really doesn’t want to. Really. And feels like I am wasting my time, wasting my youth, becoming an increasing failure and racking up increasing embarrassment the longer I stay… more of me can’t see any logic in leaving. Everything points to one more year. (At least?)

The follow-up thought to this was what if I leave Dumas, and every morning feels like this one? Admittedly melodramatic, I just can’t seem to get a handle on myself. The quandary of the third year TFA teacher. Am I finished? At a stand still? At a draw?

But if I leave, will it feel better?

I believe in life leading you straight where you need to go. I believe in the omnipresent sensation of vertigo that’s lingered since finishing The Unbearable Lightness of Being the year my mom died. I believe in inescapable depression and blinding joy. I trust the process, I do, and I’m well aware  I need to work to follow whatever path I’m supposed to lead.

But what am I supposed to be working on?! But where will my fulfillment come from?! But where I am I supposed to go and what am I supposed to put my energy into and where am I going to find the outside validation that I desperately crave?!

I think what’s ruining me here, now, is the utter lack of guidance. I have a boss that leads me in paperwork and a secretary that yells my kids into line (or at least holds them when I can’t teach with them in the room). I have a team that operates in complete isolation from one another and complains itself into unity. I have a group of 80 English teachers I facilitate once a month in an event that will be obsolete in two months, and a course of 5 writing instructors that love our hour each month together but have zero tangible evidence of results that I so desperately need to get anywhere. Where is my data? Where is my evidence of learning? Where is my legacy for Teach For America? My legacy for Dumas? My legacy for blindly moving to the south and giving three years to it?

What have I been doing all this time?

It’s this daunting potential transition… it’s killing me. In college I had numbers: percent member increase in an organization, total dollars fund raised, conferences attended and presented at, attendance at meetings and programs. I had hard evidence that I was doing something. I had counselors and bosses and presidents to guide me and put me somewhere and pat me on the back when I did a good job.

Here there is just space and static. There is paperwork, red tape, an undeniable feeling of alienation, and countless opportunities zooming or floating or glaring by me. I thought I attempted to grab one? Thought I pulled a few toward me? But what do I have?

Am I in the middle of something productive? Am I at the end of something I should leave? Am I ignoring a major omen? Am I resisting something that will obviously satiate the ache I have for feeling productive and fulfilled?

Spring fever?

Quarter-life crisis continued?

Obvious opportunity to leave and start over?

Solace comes from knowing that, at the least, I have nine more weeks in this job, in this town, with these kids. Nine weeks of opportunity for some great reveal in life. I keep a running mantra: I am 25, I am smart, I am capable, I am willing, I am open-minded and ready to make change, I am humble, I am happy, I am ready, I am ready, I am ready.

Today was our first day of Professional Development in San Antonio. The trip started yesterday (but feels like it started weeks ago). Our flight was at noon: three TFA-ers (which would become four when the last completed the marathon she ran in the morning) and two Arkansas Tech faculty members, the facilitators of our trip.

In 24 hours I already feel a lot has been clarified: my faith in the purpose and potential of this program; what “LEAD21″ really means (the name of our program under the grant from the Walton Foundation); how much of a privilege it really is to be here.

We were greeted off the plane by the sweetest HR girl with a sign, who promptly walked us to the limo that would take us to the hotel. I’m not kidding. We arrived, threw our stuff down, and met up with all the principals (including my Assistant Principal AKA boss). We heard their introductions and introduced ourselves. I had the pleasure of being the least experienced and youngest person in the room. When it was my turn to introduce myself the cliche “heart like a hammer” had a meaning I feel only once every few years. The administrators we shared the room with are supposedly some of the strongest in the state, with diverse experience and schools. One guy is originally from Michigan, like me! His advice was, “You will always, always be a yankee.” He moved to Arkansas in seventh grade.

Yep.

Sometimes my brain really has to fight to keep this blog from getting personal. I do wish I could explain all on my mind, but I’m keeping it professional.

In short, today was a day that was very well presented, well-considered, and left all of us feeling like valued, important, promising humans with tons of potential. I feel like I really can do this. I can lead a school in the Delta. I can and want to and will work as hard as I can because I care about the community and I care about the kids.

Or, that’s how I feel when in the room with five people that are huzzah-ing that with me.

I do believe it. And I want it. But. Like anything else, the number one hold up is a four letter word: fear.

I’ve been toying with this for a while. Since I read some Buddhist-inspired life coach written guide-lines for finding out what you want from your life. Any life coach will probably ask you what you would do if money and other easily-stated-as-not-important things were no object. If fear wasn’t part of the picture.

Today part of me was really thinking that school leadership would be it. I still believe it. Deep in my tiny core I believe I want to do it. And I believe I want to do it young. But there is a big, well actually it’s all of me, piece that says well actually, Caroline, that’s ridiculous. Not only are you not going to do that, but it’s not really possible considering the political climate and lack of experience you live in. Yep. Not possible.

But what if it was? Or what if I made it possible?

The people closest to me tell me I don’t fit in Dumas. Tell me I’m not cut out to stay here. But … why? Because they’ve never seen it done, and because they don’t expect it to happen, and because it never has happened. Why start now? Start now because I want it to start now. Start now because I am making it start now. Start now because somewhere two and a half years ago I started a path that put me in a place to think that this might be possible. To think that I might be able to love hard enough for people to give me a chance. To work hard enough to maybe acquire the skills I need to be a benefit more than a risk to my district.

Any potential for leadership in my district, or any district in the Delta, obviously will take time (not to mention I have to finish my masters and a position has to open), but I’ve got to get over this fear and realize that no one is going to believe me or support me until I act on the things I’ve learned and feel.

I try to hide how much I love inspirational quotes, but one hanging right beside my front door is from my fellow Motor City native, Henry Ford: You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.

People won’t start validating me until I do something worth validating. I’ve heard (and preached myself) the value of stepping out of your comfort zone and into the place where you make things happen. Well. Now’s the time to start making things happen.

And it’s going to take quite a bit of discomfort to start.

On Sunday I’m boarding an airplane and flying to San Antonio with some of my favorite TFA ladies to attend a LEAD21 conference in San Antonio. We’re the founding females for Arkansas Tech’s “Walton Scholars” program which recruits Arkansas TFA corps members to start grad school to develop into school leaders.

I’m ready to GO.

***

The last two weeks have been my most negative of the year. I have been seriously considering quitting my school, my job, and feeling like the decision to stay in this state three more years was a bad one. Operative words being feeling like and not knowing, because I know I made a good choice and I know I’m doing a good thing for myself… but I’ve really been on edge lately.

I have high expectations for life. For my job, for my happiness, for my surroundings. I expect, at the least, to be supported and recognized as a human. Most days I don’t feel like this is happening professionally. I don’t care if I’m a “Teach America” or if I’m 25 or if I’m significantly more radical than most people in my town… I am a human! I am a teacher! I am someone who to my core cares about the well being and happiness of other people, and while I try to plant my humility seed very very deep in my heart and the very core of my being, I feel that there comes a point where you quit biting til blood and you start to talk. Weather people want to hear it or not, you talk.

I’m at a point where I’d like to start talking. The newest hurdle is how and to whom do I talk? How can I express the rampant unprofessionalism, the detrimental negativity, the lack of planning that has been destroying my (and many other teachers’) mood on a daily basis, without sounding like a tiny kid throwing a tantrum?

I want to stay because I love my kids, and because I believe in the absolute necessity of education. I want to stay because the levee and the fields and the curvy drives to Monticello still steal my breath daily. I want to stay because the pee-wee basketball game is a 5 minute walk from my house, because I sometimes have 45 minute conversations in Piggly Wiggly, because I love stories about the hoodnic, because my pen-pals from this year are already just as invested in my next year kids as I am. I want to stay because my classroom is full of things I’ve acquired for these kids. Because my curriculum, thought process, and comfort in my job is here in this district.

But I can’t stay and pretend to be blind. I can’t stay and pretend the adults running my job are deaf, or have more important things to do than address the fact that our students aren’t getting what they need.

So with this decision made, what comes next?

• A start-up non-profit that targets needs I think I’ve found?
• An after school program for “at risk” students that’s independently run?
• A transfer to a different school in my district?
• One more year ending with a mouth of blood from biting my tongue and a masters degree?
• A dramatic flee? To the sarcastically put “haven” of Little Rock?
• A few applications to the districts I have friends in where people are happy where they work?

What now?

I know I will move forward. I know I can move forward. But I don’t know how!

Added to the list of much needed additions to TFA: mentors. Since I’ve graduated college I have been craving a professional mentor. Someone to be candid with, who understands at least a little what my professional life is like, who can imbue seasoned wisdom without squashing young fire. I have drive. I have motivation. I have an overwhelming love for people, both other students and my neighbor faculty members. But what can I do?!

NOTE: Almost exactly a year ago I was feeling almost the exact same way. I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse.

But alas, it’s happening.

The past week has been what feels like a repeat of the week I had when deciding to officially join the 2010 corps. It feels like the world has infinite pinpoints– places barely visible but there and available, mine for the taking –and I have a looming sense of guilt for not having marked more of them, for not going down the thousands of other paths I have access to.

There’s a piece of me, a pretty big piece lately, that feels like an utter failure. I haven’t made any kind of “transformational change” in my classroom (surprise!), I don’t feel like I have solid and authentic relationships with people in my community, my students aren’t doing anything miraculous (and by that I mean they are, daily, but I’ve no bearing on it). I am 25, I’ve been here for a tenth of my life (math!), and I still feel like I don’t belong. The number of failures stacks up daily, weighs on me, is reiterated with every negative comment I hear from anyone I’ve come into contact with. Anyone. I’ve been conditioned, or I have a complex, to pile the fault upon my own shoulders. When I hear negative things, my gut instinct is always to analyze how I could have prevented it, or how to counter it in the least threatening most productive way possible. It’s kind of exhausting.

I sound pitiful (not to mention like a whiney kid), but my point isn’t to get upturned noses. My point is to figure out where and what I expected to be at this point, and why I’m not there. And how I can get there.

I’m at Kepler’s because a few months ago Erin and I decided to register for the TFA fund raiser Mississippi Marathon. On a burst of happiness from the half we did in November, we even registered for the pre-race dinner. Here. At Kepler’s.

In recent months, though, a working part of my declining confidence and growing frustration is that I went from running with her and our local five nights a week to running solo again. Both of them injured, I’ve been taking my steps alone, less confidently, less consistently.

Regardless I arrived at packet pick-up in the Greenville Mall tonight, an hour or two ago, tentatively committing, really committing, to these 13 miles across the bridge from Arkansas to Mississippi. Behind the table where I acquired my bib was Kara, our Director of Alumni Affairs in Arkansas.

Kara, a good handful of others, and I took a grad class at Arkansas Tech last year. Currently, four of us are enrolled in a school finance class. We were all just offered an opportunity to be Walton Scholars, the first four of a long-term TFA and Arkansas Tech University partnership in which the Walton Foundation pays tuition for our graduate degree in exchange for an additional two year commitment to the state of Arkansas after the program ends. In short: three more years in Arkansas. Kara told me that all three girls, herself included, accepted the program. She also told me she trained even less than I did for the half marathon we’re running at 7am. After talking to her, I decided I am less of a failure than I claim. I am stressing out about things that are relative. I have created and walked into many amazing opportunities as it is.

And after talking to her, I decided to commit to the ATU program. I’ll get my masters in educational leadership and continue to work in Arkansas for the next three years, making this summer my potential, at minimum, halfway point for my career in this state.
Which means I’ll probably be back at Kepler’s for this race again next year, hopefully anticipating a full marathon and laughing about how nervous I was to make a decision with such an obvious answer.

I haven’t been solidly upset with myself in a while, which might be a bad sign. I’ve been told, relatively often (especially since joining TFA), that I have a pretty good handle on being reflective. Self-awareness, self-criticism, self-analysis, self-obsessed, maybe. I try to stay humble, but a girl’s got to acknowledge when something is going at least okay. I’d say my self-reflection is okay.

Until today.

Again, this outsider-TFA-young-and-inexperienced shield is blinding, totally and absolutely blinding me. Today I let some invisible giant’s hand press gently on my collar bone, slowing this galloping high horse (sprinting, really, the past few months)… then giving me the chance: will I leap? jump? slide? or fall off this high horse I’ve been riding?

Who am I? Who am I to assume anything, to take responsibility or be angry at anything that is not personally me? This blog, the idea of it, rips me apart because I never feel justified. I never feel my thoughts articulate enough or fair enough or candid enough to mean anything. Never sure if I can back myself up if I get a comment (verbal or web-based) that criticizes whatever I felt brave enough to post. For a while I boosted myself up in my position at school, as an educator. I saw holes and thought I addressed them. I pushed forward and kept my resolve and my spine and my faith that I was doing the right thing, or at least making every effort to.

Maybe I’ve just done that long enough, and now I have to sit and wait. But I can’t take “credit” or responsibility or — I can’t take anything. I just have to wait and see.

This probably doesn’t make any sense. If you’ve followed my blog you know leadership team is a big reason why I am so invested, in love with, proud of, and frustrated with my school. Today our superintendent sat in and the meeting was run differently than usual, for the better. I took a back, far back, seat and watched things roll, like a kid on a road trip. Sedate and zoned out but still present, ready to lash out at a potential brother poking my side.

My role in leadership team has changed, which I see as a good thing. I do wonder, though, if with “less” self-administered responsibility I’ll be more or less invested in the school. If the committee begins to show more leadership, my investment and happiness will obviously jump. If I feel less of a drive or reason or obligation to attempt to make any impact on anything, I’ll be plagued with a sense of failure, isolation, needing to leave.

On my agenda today, I wrote oh so tiny, “BACK ON AN ISLAND…” because of the well-known concept of every teacher feeling isolated, feeling infringed on when someone else steps in the classroom for any reason. I feel like I’m on an island at school. I’ve talked less with my team, I’ve avoided more conflict, I’ve planned less and held myself accountable to less. I’m not TFA anymore; I don’t get observed anymore; I don’t collaborate as much; I worry less; I’m more protective of my room and my procedures and my ideas; I am a “veteran” more so than at least a handful of teachers at my school.

I don’t know how I feel about any of this, only that I feel I’ve lost not just my own footing, but the ground doesn’t feel so safe, either. My charge-forward-ignore-all-periphery-at-war-with-the-achievement-gap mentality has been thrown… or I’ve let it take off running with the horse I leapt from.

I’m telling you, this blog is getting worse and worse. This isn’t musings, not even word vomit, it’s something a lot more slimey, like the goo from middle school science that defied the conventions of solid or liquid, with properties of both. That’s my words. Filling in every available space when spread out, but balling up (trying to be tough) when you pick them up.

As I sat in leadership team an hour ago, I looped the question in tiny cursive, “Do I want to learn the hoops to jump through?”

Today we got an email that the Walton Grant has officially gone through. Four of us TFA vets are invited to free tuition grad school through Arkansas Tech for school leadership (my choice would be administration). The price tag is cut to only fees and a two year commitment to any education occupation in Arkansas after the program. It would be one more promised year in Dumas, and two more anywhere else in the state. Do I want to do this? Do I really want to commit to double my experience in this state, in this field? And this is with the Summer Principals Academy still hazy in the background, with no decision or interview for at minimum six more weeks.

…but what else am I going to do?

A little part of me is just pitying myself, is hiding, maybe a little afraid. I think the bigger, more sensible, more obvious part of myself knows I’m ready to stay here, ready to risk it, ready to keep dragging my feet through this winter mud until the fields dry out, until the cotton is back, until I have another degree and more insight into why my kids can’t, sighingly literally can’t, live a life of the same opportunity I have. Until I can play just the tiniest part in giving it to them.

I know it’s February. My heart’s just a little bit happier that it’s 5:38 and a little past dusk… Glad that the 5:00 black of winter is already in the past, but still half-dreading the three and a half months until summer. But part of me is excited for those months, too. Part of me knows I can do this, of course I can, I just– I can’t articulate what I feel like I’m missing, but it’s something. & I think I’m going to hang out on the ground til I can find it. I’ll get back on the horse when these bruises have cleared up.

Balancing the desperation of purposeful expectations with allowing people to be human is really hard. I feel like I know what my students are capable of because I understand the logic of learning, but I so often overlook the emotional investment, the core of a strong relationship to trust that you are actually trying to help them. And over everything else is fostering and feeding and growing the strength and courage in another individual to believe that it is possible and that it is worth working for and that failure will only bring more success.

And after all that I wonder why I don’t take my own advice, don’t gulp my own medicine. I’m walking a tightrope, always, between feeling committed and like it’s worth the risk to absolutely devote myself to this school district, to take everything too seriously (and personally), OR keeping one foot in the “real world” far and away in some hypothetical coastal town. Maintaining a resume, keeping contacts, pushing leadership opportunities that are more “standard” and closer to what I’m used to. From places and organizations that already have strong leadership, that will actually tell me what to do and hold me accountable.

Truth is, with all this grad school stuff, I wonder if I even want to be held accountable again. It’s kind of great feeling like I’m usually my own boss, being able to choose when I uphold commitments and when I don’t, to always have the excuse that “everything’s a mess” or “no one told me the deadline” or “I didn’t check my email soon enough” when I don’t do what I know I was supposed to do.

I’m ridiculous, I know it. Grad school will/would fill the void of accountability. I just. When I was in college, and through the jobs I held there and before I got there, I was managed incredibly well. I knew what I was doing wrong and right. I knew how to get better. I knew where I could move forward and the consequences of stepping back. Here, though, freedom is limiting. I feel paralyzed because as much as I’m a self-starter, I’m not. As much as TFA could develop me further, it can’t. As much as I’m working hard to be part of my community, to learn and grow and connect, I am still a perpetual alien. I believe different things. I try too hard and create inconveniences and don’t yet have the confidence to back up the core of my own human. With my students I might be starting to. But with my peers, my faculty, the people I am working with, I feel pushy and liberal and irritating.

I guess it might be to the point where I’ve been here, I am vaguely expecting relationships with my surroundings, and I don’t have them.

So the obvious answer, then, is Well Caroline, are you actually trying to make the relationships happen? But the knee jerk response is Why does everything in my life feel calculated, purposeful, intentional, and like work? The relentless pursuit TFA so graciously bestowed upon me has become something of a thorn.

It’s an accident that these posts have fallen toward a negative slant. It’s because this is January a potential change is impending.