Talking About Education
It was brought to my awareness a couple of nights ago that I could talk about education for a long time… a very long time… and not get sick of it. Is that weird? I’ve heard that if you find your passion, time seems to cease. I think my passion is Education. Sounds strange to say that my passion is education when I have taught in public schools for 16 years (ie. the life span of about 2.3 careers), I’m pursuing a doctoral degree in educational leadership, and I am an elected school trustee in my community. Personally, I find it kind of weird to finally actualize my true calling when it is something that I have been doing for years.
Yesterday, I was talking about education over a span of 12 hours. Seems excessive, but it exemplifies my passion for education. First, I met up with one of my colleagues and chatted for 2 hours about teaching and learning. The coffee was pretty good too. However, The 2 hours felt more like 20 minutes. I had to end our conversation abruptly to go to the school board office to chair the SD46 Education Standing Committee meeting. Once again, the 2 hour meeting (that is, 30 minutes overtime) felt more like 20 minutes. Zoom. I had to rush home to greet my daughter and start tutoring students. My first client of the afternoon was more like a goal setting session than a tutoring session which lasted for 1.5 hours (again, 30 minutes overtime). He seemed content with the session but my second client canceled due to illness. So, I made a yummy dinner for my family, ate dinner, and my third client arrives. In this session, we plowed through several big concepts in Chemistry 11 and Pre-Calculus 11. The hour just flew by. Finally, the fourth client arrives but we soon realize that she was still ahead on the content compared to the rest of her class. Last week we worked on topics that she would be potentially miss during her excused absences. We used the session instead to talk about course planning with her mom; another engaging conversation about education. Talking all day about education and loving it.
My little family does not like to talking about education as much as I do and that’s OK. They are passionate about other things like hockey, softball, swimming, and mountain biking. They are all good things too, but not something I would be interested in (at least, not yet). What’s your passion?