I'm anxious to start teaching again. I'm planning things out in my head, but as I do that, I know it's useless because everything will change. Let's see: 36 weeks of classes, minus 3 weeks for ACPs, 6 weeks when students won't show up, 3 weeks for holidays, and 3 weeks when I'll be off doing something else and that's about 21 weeks of school. And I could be teaching one or more of 8th, 9th or 10th grade, during the morning, evening or afternoon. I might have 6 turmas or 10 turmas, 300 or 500 students. I'll most likely be teaching Biology. I might have a day off every week. And all this begins in two weeks.
Every day I try and make sense of the world I've ended up in, and every day it feels like I'm waking up for the first time. I realize I'm in my bed in my room in my house in this town in Mozambique in Africa on the opposite side of the equator on the other side of the world from where I woke up the previous 24 years. And my mind climbs from that safe little place where it was so used to being, down along a tightrope surrounded by fiery pits of risk and failure, across to the other side where there's another safe little place. I truly feel like I've found that gain, and so I'm not putting as much on the line every day. At the same time, waking up into a safe little place might mean that I can actually teach this year, instead of being worried about crossing that tightrope.
Or maybe I should be realizing that this is the safest I'll be, right now, in this moment, with nothing to do and relaxed, and that I'll have to come down from this very soon in order to cross that tightrope again at the end of the year.
Peace
John
