Why I Love My Job

I realized that I perhaps ought to clarify why I love my job, instead of just stating that I do love it. So, here are the reasons I love teaching Spanish:

1) I get to do something different every day. Not just different tasks. Some days involve more direct instruction, other days involve student-led activities. If a particular topic is difficult or boring, the next section of grammar or vocabulary is often interesting. I love my job because I don't feel like I'm doing the same thing over and over, and there is progression.

2) I can move around! I can be in my office, in the classroom, at my desk, at the whiteboard, standing in the back to watch student presentations, roaming the room to make sure everyone is speaking Spanish, etc. Once upon a time I had a job as an editor. The company for which I worked was great ("Fun" was one of their top ten core values) and I had great coworkers, and of course I enjoy editing, but every day I would arrive and sit for several hours at the same desk in the same cubicle staring at the same computer and doing similar, repetitive things.

3) I get to interact with people. Again, as much as I love reading, writing, and proper grammar and spelling, being alone eventually makes me feel isolated and sullen. Interacting with people gets me outside my own brain and gives me new perspectives. Plus, people are just plain interesting.

4) I have creative control. This is similar to being able to do something different every day. Even though I usually follow a syllabus prepared by a world languages department, I can take the day's topic (exciting things like "Indirect Object Pronouns" and "Food-Related Vocabulary" and do almost whatever I want with it. We can play games, have conversations, perform skits, fill out worksheets, create menus, role-play, or do a number of things. It's a fun challenge trying to guarantee that neither my students nor I become bored with material.

5) I get to help people. (I must note here that a number of my students might claim that forcing them to learn Spanish is not helping them. They are wrong.) There is nothing more fun that seeing something click in a person's brain. Through explanations, input, guided practice, and structured output, I can help people learn to communicate in another language. Students go from knowing very little Spanish to writing entire compositions, and there is something so exciting to me about being part of that.

That's why I love my job.

So now my question for you all is (and this is assuming you love all or part of what you do): Why do you love your job? Whether you work full- or part-time time, inside or outside the home, why do you love what you do? It's fun finding out what people enjoy because then you get to know them better.

I Want My Brain Back

I've always been a little spacey. My husband would probably say that I am very spacey, but I'm not sure that being spacey and unobservant are the same thing. Anyway, I am already off my main point.

I became even more spacey when I was pregnant. It was like my brain was continually in a fog, and I would misplace things, forget appointments and anything in my schedule that was even slightly out of the ordinary, misspeak, and be unable to remember details, words I wanted to use, the last thing that was said to me, or the second half of the sentence I was in the middle of uttering.

Well, finally I wasn't pregnant anymore, and my brain seemed to emerge from its foggy surroundings, but unfortunately the spaceyness is just as bad as it was when I was pregnant. This is not due to surging, raging hormones, but rather to the lack of sleep and the fact that I'm now keeping track of details for two people instead of one. I don't feel like my mind is foggy, but rather that there are huge black gaps in my thoughts. I am still losing things, forgetting things, and trailing off in the middle of sentences while a smile slowly spreads across Ian's face and he finally repeats what I've said so far so I can remember where I was.

I became especially frustrated yesterday evening when I opened the cabinet, excited about my evening snack of a banana with some Nutella, and discovered a half-full gallon of milk in there. I don't remember having milk since my morning coffee (not that my memories mean much anymore), and the milk was room temperature, so I can only assume it sat there all day. I neither noticed the milk in the cabinet earlier nor noticed its absence in the refrigerator. And Ian doesn't drink milk, so unfortunately I had no hope of blaming him.

Ahhh (<--that's supposed to be a sigh). I can only hope that as I adjust more and more to motherhood, I will gradually recover the use of my brain and eliminate both the fog and the blank spots. Maybe my mom friends can give me hope that even if my mind never fully returns to normal, I can at least operate around my new levels of spaceyness.