When I didn't keep a promise...

At the start of the school year,  I made myself a promise that I would take care of myself and keep my stress low. I would do yoga at least every other day. I would stay active on Twitter. I would keep up with my blog. I would go to bed at a decent time. This seemed to be a simple yet important promise that would also benefit my students.
Its almost half way through the year and I have not kept my own promise. Other than going to bed at a decent time,  yoga had become a once a week thing, I rarely get on Twitter, and my blog has been updated once. I still spend the majority of my time consumed in grading or BTSA or Yearbook or the school newspaper.


I know my experience with this is not unique. If I have learned anything from being on Twitter, connecting with educators, and dating a teacher is that there are hundreds of thousands of other teachers feeling the same stress and frustrations as me. Yet I still see my failure to my personal promise as frustrating.


Since the purpose of this blog is to celebrate failure, I’m trying to refocus my energy from to find something I can take from this experience. So far,  I've rediscovered the fact that I'm terrible at delegating. I like to do things myself rather than have someone else do it. Rather than having my TAs help me grade easy assignments, I want to do it myself. Rather than have my yearbook editors find their staffs’ mistakes, I want to do it myself. Rather than relying on my lessons from my previous year, I want to fix them. For me, it's weakness to ask for help. This is also not a new discovery about myself. When I started dating my boyfriend my two years ago, I was even worse at asking for and accepting help.


This desire to do everything, however, make my promises to myself impossible. If I want to put myself first I need to learn to delegate some work to those around me. My failure to my own promise has reminded me how important it is to divide up responsibilities. Ideally, I'm hoping that I will magically flip a switch and learn to divide tasks, but I know it will be frustrating.


But maybe if I promise myself to focus on improving my skills of delegation then I will be able to fulfill my former promise to myself.

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