Smores and SMORS

Smores … have you heard of these? Gooey toasted marshmallow, slightly melted chocolate, squished together between plain biscuits ….mmmh 🙂

Mostly eaten around campfires at least once in your growing up life. Those were the days when you dreamed of what you would be when you grew up…

For me, those dreams never included being a teacher, except I must admit that I always rather admired Matilda’s sweet natured teacher, Miss Honey , so maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me something. But I did a good job of squashing that down until I turned 23 and realised that my job as an event’s co-ordinator was not fulfilling. I realised that I craved a more meaningful connection with people, than the short, business encounters I had with people across my desk while preparing the order of items they needed set up for their function.

FLF – fairy-lights flashing is a code from those days that will be stuck in my head forever. Every now and then I would get out of the office and go to a venue to check up on the setup for a wedding or a 21st, but it wasn’t enough to make my soul come alive. So I said goodbye and decided that the next chapter of my life would be devoted to giving back to the community. Thus began my journey into becoming a teacher.

From the outset I gave 110%, worked late, volunteered to be in charge of myriads of things, went home exhausted and felt that I was finally making a difference. Looking back, I wish someone had taken me aside and told me, that my worth as a teacher was not in how much I could achieve in one day. I wish someone had said that I didn’t have to volunteer for everything in order to succeed. I wish someone had told me to just be myself, to take things in my natural stride and to look after myself and have a life after school. But nobody did. Upon reflection I would say, there seems to be this unspoken yet clearly felt initiation code that, this is what is expected of teachers. Now, 16 years later here I am daring to say that is not what it should be. We need to start a quiet but determined revolution. Will you join me …?

Small moments of Reflection… this is one secret weapon.

The reality is that in our packed days, we often feel we can’t commit to downtime. From the time, we enter the classroom in the morning to the time we drive out the school gate, demands are made on us. Little voices, if we are in kinder garden or primary school clamouring over each other for our attention, even before the school bell has officially announced the start of the day. In high school, we are less obviously in demand by the teens, but the piles of marking shout out as soon as we come into sight of our too crowded work stations. Best face forward, deep breaths, copious cups of tea or coffee, we can do this we tell ourselves day after day, until we finally drag ourselves across the finish line on the last day of term.

We laugh at cartoons depicting this …. yet the truth is we laugh because they have captured exactly how we feel. Our well-meaning friends who say, “ooh you’re on holiday now”, have no idea how desperately we need the holiday.

How do we make it possible for us to come alive every day and not just in the window periods that occur for us in Zimbabwe, 3 times a year, between the two hymns that all teachers can sing without the hymn book, “Lord dismiss us” and “Lord behold us?” (The former one with more conviction)

How do we begin to get around the constant feeling of exhaustion that gets progressively worse the further we venture into the term? How do we begin to change the cartoons that are drawn about teachers?

I think a place we can start is in creating a least one SMOR a day. One small moment of reflection, away from our classroom, away from our colleagues, away from our to do list.

10 minutes, away from everything, to just still the buzz around you. Here are some ideas. I’d love you to share some of yours to help others create those SMORs.

1. Take a walk outside.
2. Breathe deeply.
3. Make yourself a cuppa, that you can drink hot, uninterrupted or a pour a glass of cool water in summer.
4. Sit in your car for 10 minutes … I am being serious … sometimes the only peaceful place where you won’t be found is in your car.
5. Every now and then take a packed lunch to a quiet place on campus and chew slowly.

Imagine 50 minutes a week where you chose just to still yourself, breathe and feel human. Imagine the cumulative benefit of 650 minutes over the course of the Term. Yet as teachers we are so pressured to always be on the go, that we forget that we are also humans with needs and wants and most importantly feelings. We don’t stop long enough to be aware of what we feel, we just keep going.

Start today so by the time we go back to school you have cultivated a daily habit.

I’d love to hear how it goes … ( but sssh remember, the revolution begins quietly, 10 minutes at a time).