back to work

The wonderful thing about education is that we have winter and summer vacation. It is truly a time to reestablish ourselves, our identities, clean our desks off, organize our past semester's paperwork...and still anticipate the new school term.

Teaching at the university level, I don't often have repeat students, which is nice as I get to meet so many new faces each term. It proves to be a great brain exercise in memorization. Last term I was given the chance to teach an advanced course that only majors and minors take, which was a wonderful class, albeit extremely time-consuming outside of class. This term I teach both an elementary and an intermediate course.

This institution has been very good to me, allowing me to only take on the late afternoon-evening courses two nights a week so that I may stay at home during the day with my children and fulfill my primary job as Mommy. I don't know of too many people who have it so lucky; indeed, for me it is more of keeping my proverbial foot in the professional door than anything. However, I am reminded of how much time my work takes away from my family life each term, how "relaxation time" is filled with grading papers and working exams and lesson planning, and how much more PBS my children watch while I am in the middle of my semester.

It is an irony of Life, and I so often feel pulled, but I know to be thankful for that which I have because I somehow played my cards right and can have the best of both worlds.