Last night I received a phone call from a good friend of mine that was also a teacher. She had an issue that she wanted to ask me about as I had had experience with the same situation several years ago. We talked and texted several different ideas over the next few hours. By the time that we got off the phone at 9 p.m. she felt really good about her first step in solving a long time problem.
I was very happy to have been of some help to her tonight. It was nice to be respected for my teaching style and ability to solve challenging learning situations of all types. When I first hung up with her, however, I actually didn't feel glad to have been of service. Instead, I was extremely anxious and needed a few minutes to relax before I could join Doug for the Packers and Bears game. All the memories of how hard that situation was for me came flooding back. I remembered how much work it took to change the issues into a positive learning environment for my students. That was one of the toughest years of my teaching career with most of my time and energy put into that one problem. Tonight, I was finally able to calm down once I realized that I didn't have to get up and go to school tomorrow and face the issue. Instead all I had to do was to be supportive of a good friend. I knew that I could do that and once again was ever thankful that I could walk away when it became too overwhelming for me.
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