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| On a walk around 7:30 pm. The kids should have been getting ready for bed, but oh well. |
Once upon a time I taught elementary school for many years in Los Angeles. Although working with kids was often rewarding, there was plenty about teaching that I did not enjoy. Some of the required curriculum was decidedly lackluster. Then there was the endless paperwork, the depressing home situations, the demoralizing staff meetings (your test scores still suck!), the discipline issues, the test prep, and the staff politics. Worst of all, I felt like a failure almost every day. In the beginning, I just didn't know what I was doing. And even later when I did, there was simply not enough time in the day to do everything, and certainly never enough time to do it well.
But despite the overwhelming pressures of teaching in low-income under-performing schools (often in danger of being "taken over" by the state), I decided for my own sanity to spend some time each day doing things that
I enjoyed and considered important, even if nobody else cared that I did them (or even if my principal and other higher ups actively discouraged me from doing them). I read aloud to my students every day. We exercised every day. And we talked about poetry and sang songs every single day.
Turns out that learning to cope with an incessant sense of failure and always having more to get done than can possibly get done were excellent preparation for being a parent. Now as a parent of three little ones, when the sense of failure becomes especially overwhelming, I remember this lesson from my teaching days:
make time every day to do the things that you love.
(to identify trees)
, one of the books in the 
