Gloom and Gratitude

January cold in Seoul is bitter, I have called a running hiatus, final grades for the quarter and semester are due, my grade level team colleagues—consummate talkers all—tend to rhapsodize through a team meeting way beyond both my attention span and sitting capabilities, and I grow weary of teaching sixth grade.*  So my spirits tipped, and I have been a tad glum this last week or so . . . until yesterday, that is.

I awakened with the alarm that I never change, but on weekends I’m permitted to press the snooze button and I usually select the maximum amount of snoozing offered:  SIXTY minutes!  I opted for the snooze but ultimately eschewed additional lounging once the radio played for me again.  Instead, I perfunctorily completed mandatory ablutions and then shuffled into the kitchen to prepare a bowl of Kashi “whole wheat biscuits” (Island Vanilla flavor) topped with the remaining blueberries and immersed in skim milk.  Feeling more dispirited than exhilarated, I booted up the laptop for a morning perusal of email and news online as I breakfasted.  Quite early on in this enterprise, my brother Phil found me on Yahoo, and we engaged in an instant messaging conversation, something we haven’t had in a few weeks, and something I realized I had been missing.  Maybe five minutes into our conversation, I heard a ping signaling another instant message from somewhere else in cyber world.  Well, I hadn’t opened Facebook, so I knew it couldn’t have come from that site.  I clicked on my other open email accounts and discovered my nephew Zack instant messaging me on Gmail; the last time we had talked in this mode, I still lived in Japan!  A minute later my nephew Max joined the chat.  I suddenly had three family members communicating with me simultaneously and a winter dark Saturday morning began to brighten.

An hour later I found myself heading to school to complete the grading and the grades necessary for a Monday morning deadline.  At the gate to enter post, the gate guard checked my ID and car code.  Because a different company was recently awarded the security contract, the gate guards are all relatively new, and most of them have limited English.  As he raised the gate to allow me to drive through, the guard said, "Have a good time!"

Well okay, then—this new day had somehow become aligned with stars I hadn’t seen recently . . . mostly because I had forgotten to look up!

So February has almost arrived, and perhaps spring lurks just beyond it.  And just as soon as those single digit early morning temperature decamp, I may rediscover my runnner’s jubilee.  Grades are fully input for the Semester 1, and I do recognize what good people my colleagues truly are, how devoted and how focused they are to making a positive difference for kids.  And I applied for a transfer—unlikely to transpire since I reside in the bottom category of applicants.  But who knows?  If I don’t transfer, maybe an opening will become available at a higher grade level for next year.  I’ve always been fairly consistent “hoper of all things.”

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*For me, the magic of teaching lies in the realm where teacher, students, and content intersect.  I am a more effective teacher when I am passionate about the content.  I am a happier and more motivated teacher when the ideas, reasoning, and experience of my students stimulate and enhance my own.   Ever since I began teaching middle school, sixth grade has been my least favorite grade to teach because I never really like most of the designated English Language Arts curriculum for grade six, and so many sixth graders are still such rigidly concrete thinkers only.  And that’s not wrong or even necessarily a bad thing; it’s just where they are in their development.  I, though, find myself craving the ideas and discussion that unfold with the addition of greater ability and experience with abstraction.

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Over the years I have realized that during the melancholy interludes of living, reviewing and commemorating the blessings and grace that have shaped and enhanced my life always augment perspective and renew hope.  Gratitude can change many things in our world but maybe mostly because it changes us inside ourselves.

From a church periodical, I clipped out a “gratitude challenge,” an activity suggested to be used with youth.  I have decided it is an activity to be used with me:

1.       Write 10 physical abilities you are grateful for.

2.       Write 10 material possessions you are grateful for.

3.       Write 10 living people you are grateful for.

4.       Write 10 deceased people you are grateful for.

5.       Write 10 things about nature you are grateful for.

6.       Write 10 things about today you are grateful for.

7.       Write 10 things on earth you are grateful for.

8.       Write 10 modern inventions you are grateful for.

9.       Write 10 foods you are grateful for.

10.   Write 10 things you are grateful you know.

Stay tuned . . .