Supposed To

I laughed and thought, "I'll never do that."

My Elementary Education major housemates--three to be exact--spent a good deal of their senior year writing practice lesson plans and learning to make kindergarten crafts. I rolled my internal (perhaps also my external) eyes and went back to studying the wing mechanisms of insects and the ecology of the mountains.

In a way, I wish that I had leaned over their shoulders more often and listened to the discussions about Bloom's Taxonomy (which has nothing to do with Kingdom, Phylum, etc.) and anticipatory sets. Maybe I would have gleaned some valuable tips for my own teaching career.

But I wasn't supposed to be a teacher. Not in a million years.

I wasn't supposed to be grading and making Powerpoints and rubrics and quizzes and brilliant (ha) lesson plans that follow the Mastery Teaching Model. I was very, very sure that I never wanted to be stuck inside a classroom, away from the outdoors, surrounded by people all. day. long.

But God often has very different plans for us. Plans to mold us and shape us into people we never imagined we could (or wanted to?) be.

Before I started teaching, I was a perfectionist, a people pleaser, and I was good at what I did, whatever it was. Now as I enter my second year of instructing middle schoolers and high schoolers in the ways of science, I feel like...a failure. I am disliked--maybe despised--by a few kids and parents, and I am never quite on top of things. Labs go awry, lessons are so boring I don't want to be in my own class...stuff falls through the proverbial crack, and I cry because I long to time travel back to college where I had a stellar GPA and all my professors had such high hopes for me.

I wasn't supposed to be teaching science to middle schoolers who couldn't care less about atoms and how they bond, or the anatomical features of spiders. They don't even like spiders.

I wasn't supposed to be meeting with an indignant parent about the write-up I gave their chatty Cathy.

I wasn't supposed to be clocking out of work long after everyone else had gone home and then sitting in a coffee shop to work for another 4 hours on a lesson that would take 40 minutes to give.

I wasn't supposed to be finding ways to relate to students who deal with peer pressure and bullying and drama and popularity contests and the birds and the bees--I was homeschooled for crying out loud!

But here I am. And every day I am forced to take a deep breath and ask God to be my sufficiency, because without Him, I'm screwed. It's infuriating and frustrating to feel so out of control all the time, but it's also humbling, and I need that. I need to learn to depend on Him, and not me. I need to learn that "my" successes are really His successes through me.

And it's better this year. I am starting to actually see my students with spiritual eyes instead of panic-stricken first-year-teacher goggles. I am starting to love people because Christ loves them, not because I get along with them. I am learning to throw myself into a ministry because God asked me to for this season, not because it was what I wanted or planned. And in doing that, there is a joy that comes--a sense of...belonging.

Of doing what I am supposed to be doing.