Waiting for the perfect moment...
Most of the time, I place little to no value on Chinese fortune cookie fortunes. Sometimes, however, their reading comes at the exact right time that I wonder if they are value-less or invaluable. A colleague of mine recently showed this one to me: If you wait too long for the perfect moment, the perfect moment will pass you by. If you have ever seen My Best Friend's Wedding, you quickly realized how un-Chinese that fortune is.
Chinese or not, for much of my existence I have been guilty of waiting for that moment to come. I have lived in a harmonized balance of patient idealism and anxious impatience. It could feasibly cover every line of a five-subject notebook to list all of the things I have waited for - consider it Santa's next worst nightmare. From a request for a date to being called on to offer my answer to a question or, most recently, refusing to prompt my students to offer genuine compliments to their fellow classmates.
The disclaimer to this, however, is that I usually only wait so long. I am not sure if I prove this Chinese fortune wrong or if I preemptively destroy the perfect moment that could eventually arise. Either way, as a human, as a woman, as a friend, as a runner, as a teacher, I constantly battle with the need to act.
In the most recent days, this has played out in several different ways. Since this blog is mainly about BUILDing my students' dreams, I will go into more detail there. But I will begin with a more personal example.
Sixty-three days from now I will run my third marathon. Most training programs recommend 16-18 weeks of structured training. With eight remaining, I realize that my previous 10 have been unstructured, filled with sporatic bouts of increased mileage, low-impact exercise, and, shockingly, days off. Falsely believing the idea that mind over matter exists in marathon training, I ran a 20-miler last Thursday. It felt fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that I decided to do a little more than the equivalent yesterday. This time, however, my impatience, my need to push and to act resulted in a ridiculously hyperelasticized, potentially strained IT band.
The lesson I should have learned from my first marathon - the one that I only trained for the half - is that running that far without having the patience to prepare is in one word: idiotic. Trading race quality for race completion is something I look forward to not doing in the future. Since I have already run two twenty-mile training runs, though, I will keep the insanity on for the rest of this one!
But, the marathon of the school year has just begun. Six weeks into it, I have found that my students continue to be receptive to me, to the content, to the day-to-day. I have found also that in order to maintain their motivation, I am going to need to do some serious outside-of-the-box thinking. The vision of my fifty-odd 14 and 15-year olds standing in front of hundreds of attendees in their clean, crisp business suits, speaking eloquently and articulately as they describe their incredible new innovations and present their business plans remains in the forefront of my mind, but for them the image of a dollar bill clouds that vision.
The biggest challenge I face isn't that realization. They are 14 and 15. I probably would have felt the same way. The biggest challenge in patience. To ensure that they are focused and motivated, I can't do what I always do. I can't push it. I can't make them want it. I must wait for the perfect moment.
But I can't wait too long.
Chinese or not, for much of my existence I have been guilty of waiting for that moment to come. I have lived in a harmonized balance of patient idealism and anxious impatience. It could feasibly cover every line of a five-subject notebook to list all of the things I have waited for - consider it Santa's next worst nightmare. From a request for a date to being called on to offer my answer to a question or, most recently, refusing to prompt my students to offer genuine compliments to their fellow classmates.
The disclaimer to this, however, is that I usually only wait so long. I am not sure if I prove this Chinese fortune wrong or if I preemptively destroy the perfect moment that could eventually arise. Either way, as a human, as a woman, as a friend, as a runner, as a teacher, I constantly battle with the need to act.
In the most recent days, this has played out in several different ways. Since this blog is mainly about BUILDing my students' dreams, I will go into more detail there. But I will begin with a more personal example.
Sixty-three days from now I will run my third marathon. Most training programs recommend 16-18 weeks of structured training. With eight remaining, I realize that my previous 10 have been unstructured, filled with sporatic bouts of increased mileage, low-impact exercise, and, shockingly, days off. Falsely believing the idea that mind over matter exists in marathon training, I ran a 20-miler last Thursday. It felt fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that I decided to do a little more than the equivalent yesterday. This time, however, my impatience, my need to push and to act resulted in a ridiculously hyperelasticized, potentially strained IT band.
The lesson I should have learned from my first marathon - the one that I only trained for the half - is that running that far without having the patience to prepare is in one word: idiotic. Trading race quality for race completion is something I look forward to not doing in the future. Since I have already run two twenty-mile training runs, though, I will keep the insanity on for the rest of this one!
But, the marathon of the school year has just begun. Six weeks into it, I have found that my students continue to be receptive to me, to the content, to the day-to-day. I have found also that in order to maintain their motivation, I am going to need to do some serious outside-of-the-box thinking. The vision of my fifty-odd 14 and 15-year olds standing in front of hundreds of attendees in their clean, crisp business suits, speaking eloquently and articulately as they describe their incredible new innovations and present their business plans remains in the forefront of my mind, but for them the image of a dollar bill clouds that vision.
The biggest challenge I face isn't that realization. They are 14 and 15. I probably would have felt the same way. The biggest challenge in patience. To ensure that they are focused and motivated, I can't do what I always do. I can't push it. I can't make them want it. I must wait for the perfect moment.
But I can't wait too long.
posted by Leslie Garner at 12:44 AM
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