Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Thanksgiving break countdown. Antibiotics. Learning to teach journal.

 I am eagerly awating my week long thanksgiving break. I wonder if people feel jelouse of  teachers long breaks, but they should not. I think perhaps we need them so we don't burn out.

I have mixed feelings about letting the cats into my office: one the one hand, they often do tremendously cute things, like right now, exploring in my messy closet and squeezing into empty nooks in a bookcase. Or jumping up onto my lap to cuddle. They fill the space with love and sweetness.

On the other hand, they shed a bunch and are to some degree tracking what's outside, in. And occasionally they've got a dingle berry or vomit time. So far not in my office, but is that just a matter of time?

I think overall it's clearly worth it for the cuteness and love. Though I currently have a "only when I'm in the office" policy with the cats, mostly to prevent them using the space as a place to vomit or drop off a dead animal they've caught. These are the kinds of reasons you don't want carpet. So much easier to clean up messes on a hardwood floor.

I think perhaps the best of both worlds is a nice plush rug that comes in neat, machine washable segments, so you can have softness on the floor, insulation during cold winters, but also ease of cleaning.

I already have too much on my plates, but I'd really like to start keeping a to-the-point journal about my journey towards mastery of the teaching skillset. I think if I do eventually want to do research and/or designing a training program for teachers, documenting the process I'm going through will be invaluable. It's like how I wished I'd kept a journal of what it was like to be a little kid so I could read it and step back into that perspective, so it would be easier to get into the shoes of the kids I'm in charge of.

In any case, I'm super excited about the free week ahead of me. I'm going to spend some of it having fun, but I'm also going to try and be super productive and finally get myself well organized and no longer messy. I would love to have that, going forward.

Also, I've had a persistent upper respiratory infection, and after trying to just get lots of rest and take some natural remedies, caved and got the antibiotics I'd been prescribed. I'm kind of doing it as a science experiment: what is it like to take antibiotics for what seems like a fairly mild thing, something non-life threatening, non-intense. Are there bad side effects? how effective is it?

So far: no bad side effects, and it seems to be working more thoroughly than any of my natural remedies. Which makes sense. taking antibiotics for an infection is like taking tylenol/ibuprofen for a headache, it's what western medicin does best, it's a medicine made specifically to address an acute issue, that has been thoroughly tested. It is, in these instances where everything is aligned, massively more effective than the slew of herbal 'natural' remedies for such things. I doubt I will use antibiotics with abandon though, as I'm concerned about adding to the antibiotic resistant bacteria that modern medicine is so worried about. But for now, I feel like it is kind of my responsibility to take it, if I'm not getting better on my own. I own it to my kids, workmates, spouse, to do something to make myself non-infectious, and it would be say to be sick through my whole break. I need my energy back so I can get some major work in.

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