When I worked as a counselor one summer I was asked to teach the juggling class. So I arranged a space and made sure that we had materials we needed: silk scarves, beanbags, pins and hacky-sacks. I made sure we had a space to practice. I recruited campers to sign up. Only I didn't know how to juggle. But I worked with a junior counselor who juggled just fine. And so I was able to wrangle children and help him come up with lessons. And I even learned enough that I could juggle three scarves as they floated through the air in front of me. Anything heavier moved too fast and I lost the pattern and everything fell to the ground. And I could juggle one ball. No more. And not well. (Hand-eye coordination has never been my thing.)
And I feel like that now. That there are too many balls in the air and I can really only handle scarves. And I can only reasonably do the pattern for three and someone keeps adding more balls to the pattern: four, five six... They go by so quickly I can't see them, can't catch them. And I don't know which ones to let go or even how I would go about doing that without dropping everything. But with so many things to do, so much coming at me that is out of my control, I have no chance to slow things down and just practice. And as a parent my life will always be like this-- scrambling to teach lessons in something that I cannot do. Comments are closed.
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K. BuchananQuaker, teacher, parent, |