Happy With Your Vocation

 Last Sunday, Pastor Jeff 's message at Gethsemane was about being a successful community.  He talked about 4 things that you or your community must do to be successful.

1. Food.  You are a happy person with food in your belly and you know where you meals are going to come from.
2. Kids. Healthy communities take care of their children.  It is the village model and not just a parent or single adult.
3. Vocation. If you have job/career and you are happy with it, you will be a happy, successful person.  If everyone in your community is this way, then you have a successful community.
4. Housing. Putting a roof over your head and having a place that you can call home makes you happy and successful.

I can't stop thinking about vocation.

Am I happy with my vocation?  How would I label my vocation?  Teaching? Education? Teacher? School employee? Wisdom giver? Learning facilatator? Manager?

Then I realized that there are two parts to my vocation; one that I love and one that I can't stand.

Educating

Love it!  Being able to set up learning for students and seeing them improve themselves is amazing.  Watching them go from confusion to understanding and from frustration to helping others.  That's the joy of what I do.  I can't think of many things that I could do everyday and still enjoy it.

Everything else

I don't even know what to call this.  And it has nothing to do with my particular school or district.  I think there issues like this in all schools and districts.

It's everything else that teachers have to do.  Meetings, budgeting, scheduling, professional development, paperwork, politics, copy machines, finding supplies, pushing for technology, fighting for materials/furniture.

It's so much.  I don't enjoy it.  I don't understand why somethings are the way they are.  I don't know the solutions around them.  I wonder how many teachers have left the profession because they aren't able to balance the joy of the classroom learning and the students with the everything else.

So, am I happy?

I don't know.  It seems to get harder and harder to deal with the "Everything Else" of my vocation.  I still love having the light bulbs shine over the student's head, pushing them to be better, putting pre- and post- next to each other for a student, and having a student give a hug when they are done with me.  I dread every thing else.  

I need to choose happy.