Oil Life, Happy Wife

Every day I read news articles about teachers leaving the profession in droves. I read stories about the failure of the system during the pandemic. I hear about growing expectations for drastically low pay. I get it, and I'll be the first one to tell you that you need to make your happiness a priority. I'm a teaching assistant in a kindergarten class. I know all too well the ding my phone makes when I get another Covid notification email. It happens multiple times a day. I know the urgency to cover a class that has been left without a teacher at the last minute. I know that teachers should have gotten a substantial pay raise decades ago.  I witness their magic every day and I don't see how they do it. They play mom or dad to all those kids while planning all of the exciting events. They go in early and stay late while maintaining a smile and a cheery disposition all day. And then when they finally go home they have their own families to tend to. And while they are technical...

I just finished a big clean out of my "Liked Pages" on Facebook. It felt good. Not quite as good as sending a truck full of stuff to the thrift store, but pretty close. I don't have a lot of time for social media anymore, and I want the content I'm seeing to be fulfilling. I want memes that make me laugh and articles that help me help my students. I want funny, relatable videos and blog posts. What I don't want is to be consumed with things that belong in the past. The old chapters of my life have been well defined. I'm a passionate, dedicated person. Once I become a part of something, I'm all in. For a couple of years I wrote for an adoption website. At first it was a few articles each month, but by the time I left that had increased to about 40 a month. I was writing news articles daily and several other larger pieces. When you are churning out that amount of content you kind of get burned out. When I stopped writing for them it wasn't because I was ...