Teacher Tip Tuesday—1 November 2010

Work it Out

When I was teaching high school back in the Aughts, this is what near-daily conversations with my husband used to sound like:

him: you need to do something for the stress.

me: like quit?

him: no, like work out.

me (stressed): and when do you think I should do that? While I sleep?

him: you wont need as much sleep if you get some exercise.

me: I don’t have time to exercise at all. I barely have time to sleep!

We went around and around like this regularly and continued to go around like that well into my days of writing curriculum. It drove me nuts. I am quite sure it drove him nuts as well. But I hate gyms. Really hate them. And I had no time.

My normal teaching day went something like this:

6am—up, shower, leave

7am—exit train, get breakfast from cart guy

7:10am—be at desk, getting ready for classes and eating along the way

7:30-3:30—teach and help students (eat in classroom, take no breaks, during free periods students would come in for help)

4pm—get home (actually, pre-kids I could easily get home anywhere from 5pm to 7pm), prep for the next day, grade-grade-grade

10pm crash

Lather, rinse, repeat.

And there wasn’t a stitch of time in there to do anything else. Friends didn’t understand why I couldn’t do things on weeknights (or Sunday nights). When essays were assigned and collected I’d lose the entire weekend to grading.

—N.B., I was an English teacher.
My understanding is that after one’s second year
in any other branch of teaching,
you never experience this level of hell ever again.—

So.

Here’s the thing.

My husband was right.

I needed some exercise.

I was right too. There wasn’t any time.

The solution: stairs. Duirng the good times, I would walk the stairs in our old school (I was on the 12th floor of a 14 story office-building-cum-high-school in NYC), at least from 12 to 7 and back to 12.

If I could do it all over again, I’d drag the kids with me.

Wordsworth and Coleridge used to take these long rambling walks (with Wordsworth’s sister, because they needed someone to keep an eye on them, those wacky kids) and that’s where their best ideas came from. This morning it’s where my best ideas came from, too.

I walk the boys to their bus stop in the morning. I speed walk home the long way round. And this morning I figured out some NaNoWriMo stuff that’s been bugging me. So tonight, when I start up the NaNo Salon, I’ll be able to perk away at my novel with some fresh ideas.

Try the walking thing. When you’re tutoring a kid, if you can, get them to walk with you. If you have errands to run, park far, far from the entrance. Do whatever you can to sneak some heart-rate-raising moments into your day. You’ll be impressed with yourself.

Yesterday I came up with a shower curtain saver idea. Let us know what genius ideas you come up with.

(And give us a headsup if you know how to patent shower curtain doohikies.)