Spring Flurries

While this may sounds like a weather report, it is not, and Chicago often has snow in Spring. What I am referring to is the storm of change and work tied into our programming during the Spring sessions. The last month or more has been fantastically busy and rewarding. My last session ended near the end of May and due to all the extra work needed, it became difficult to make all of the appointments.

Scholarship competitions, fundraisers, meetings, professional development, interviews for Summer term, planning, syllabus modification, more meetings, doctor appointments, medical issues, orchestra and band concerts, field trips, and the closing of my own kids schooling for the year. Phew.

Now things can slow down a bit and leave me to do some catching up. The first thing on my list was to catch up on some missed sleep. Recharging is essential. These last weeks proved to be telling me that I am a bit more fragile than I'd like to admit.

Some hard work comes with the satisfaction of knowing that you didn't let it beat you in the end. Some hard work comes with little visible evidence of success. And some hard work doesn't pay off right away, they are the long-term gains that manifest over lots of years. I have been asked if I thought that teaching culinary at this level was harder than working in the industry, quick and without hesitation, my answer was yes.

There isn't a single parent that hasn't questioned their skill based upon the child's advancement or success despite the fact that a lot of things that happen along a child's life, especially in teenage years that may have nothing to do with parental input. Years and years later, most of the successful adults, will say that their parental influence was positive and necessary, even when the adult may have dropped out of school or had a teenage pregnancy, or any other negative impact on life that we can all agree makes life much harder to be successful.

I count it all profitable to gain even the smallest shift in a students opinion, taste, or concept of the world at large. I dance when a kid goes from "that's nasty" to "wow, I like that".  The work can take a long time, can be hard to do, requires that I trust my kids in class and that they trust me. I have to position myself somewhere between a parental role, a type of friendship, a teacher, and a wise elder in order to do what I do successfully. This work is also about how the student sees themselves and their future.

I have always began each term with asking the kids to write about their life goals. Those kids who have been in my class in multiple times, have had the answers on the page turn from "I don't know" to "I'd like to become _____". I have heard, and witnessed, kids begin to take small steps to change what they eat, how they project themselves, how they see themselves, how they expect certain reactions from me and how we interact. To have a student start off with no idea who they want to be and have no care about what they eat, change towards a new image and shoot for much higher goals, it is all worth the effort.

I have set a personal goal with this blog and related podcast, having a regular scheduled time table, so when I have to miss days, I get a bit hard on myself, but I am working on letting go of negative self-talk.

Spring is all about new growth and return of better weather, a renewal. Rebirth. Imagine, as we all post pictures about graduations, proms, and Spring weddings, that we are all just Spring flowers nestled under the cold blankets of winter, just aching for Spring rains to melt off our heaviness and allow us to bloom.