Slowly but Surely

At the beginning of every semester, I go through a transitional period of about five to six weeks - an awkward teenage phase, if you will - of figuring out how to live on my new schedule. Considering that my life has been built around semesters for the last seven (gah! seven!) years, you would think that I could have found a more efficient way of moving from semester to semester, but nope. Here I am. Inefficient as ever.


So the semester begins and I have illusions of how I'm going to get all my school work done during the day, finish my lesson plans at night, exercise five mornings a week, cook dinner every night, and spend each weekend working only on my thesis. And oh - how earnestly I believe in those illusions. Partially because they are sort of attainable (in a perfect - albeit tremendously boring - world), and partially because I just can't not believe that it will all get done. Otherwise I don't think I would have the courage to face the onslaught of the semester. I set these lofty goals for myself, I think, because it would just be too daunting to believe that I might not be capable of giving one hundred and eighty percent at all times.

And then the semester muddles on, and my expectations start not exactly slipping, but perhaps more accurately falling into a more reasonable place. One week I'm well-prepared for everything, and then the next I feel like I'm struggling at every juncture, but somehow it evens out in the end, and I begin to get a sense of where I should be setting my goals. Doing all my Greek homework in one day? Impossible.  Finishing my thesis by the end of September? I'm going to go ahead and say that that met with tremendous failure. I've worked hard at completing my lesson plans, but often I end up printing them off five minutes before I go to teach (instead of the night before, like Goal-Oriented Mary Frances had planned). 


And then, the six week mark hits, and suddenly I feel that I've found a rhythm. I'm not quite hitting my stride, but I'm getting there. I'm getting a sense of how long tasks will take me, how far in advance I need to work for certain classes, exactly how much material seventh graders can absorb in forty minutes, and how early I need to wake up to squeeze in a quick workout in the morning.  I'm still not quite where I'd like to be - I still feel a little too scatterbrained and disorganized some mornings, but I feel better than I did six weeks ago.  My expectations aren't quite as high (read: they are WAY LOWER), but I'm probably saner and happier than I was six weeks ago as well.  So at least there's that.