Tomorrow, Tomorrow (You're Only Twenty Minutes Away)

I should be sleeping.

But--as is my wont--when I have much on my mind, I tend to stay up late to ponder.

Tomorrow is the first day of a new school year. My fifth school year as a teacher, in fact. I never expected to teach for this long, to be honest. Yet here I am at the edge of another year with only God knows what waiting in it. I certainly never expected last year to hold some of the things it held. I am glad I didn't know the days before they happened then, and perhaps I'm glad I don't know now. Each day God gives has the exact measure of mercy, of joy, of pain, of laughter that it ought. I don't need to have them all strung out in front of me to scrutinize in advance.

Teaching is humbling. I have so much I want to share with my children, but I can never live up to the vision I have in my head. I am broken, they are broken. But we can care for each other, and we do. The world is so large and so full of things I don't know. I can't teach things I don't know, and so I sometimes grow impatient with my own ignorance. I come up short against my own faults and failings. Gandhi--who I know virtually nothing about, by the way, yet from whom I have the gall to borrow this quote--said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." These words are so overused they have become cliche. But when I think about them, I freeze. What do I want for my students? How do I want them to understand their own humanity? Am I living full enough to teach them the sliver that God has given me to teach?

You know what? Teaching has so little to do with content. Or Common Core. Or state tests, or being smart. It's about all of the invisible things.

God help me to get the invisible things right, tomorrow and all of the days after that.