Everyday as I leave Camp Literacy my brain is a swirling vortex of literacy vegetable soup, thoughts spinning, mind leaping from one burst of creativity to a question of theory and application.  Dip in and letters mixed with the vegetables of multi-leveled children appear on the spoon.  The first spoonful is soggy, the letter shapes so bloated they are difficult to distinguish like the children who labor to make their sounds finding the simplest blending an effortful task.  Yet dip again and a spoonful of perfectly clear four and five letter words appear on my spoon, they slide across the spoon forming new word combinations as quickly as the eye can watch in a joyful display of discovery.  I let the spoon drop back again into the mix, this time a number joins the letters on my spoon as the words Daily 5 materializes.  I pear intently watching the words shift and move under my gaze as they form images of children reading to themselves, and writing piles of words into secret notebooks, and then the pictures are gone and the word Café takes it’s place.  My hand is poised in mid-air, as the strategies file across my spoon, flip that sound, cross-check, fluency, accuracy, and idea after idea parade across the spoon. As I lower and lift, more and more ideas flit through the theater of my spoon.  The soup is getting richer and thicker under my gaze as the books I read and the conversations I have add more ingredients.

And now the soup is always with me like a constantly simmering crock pot of meta-cognition and I get angry feeling like I should already know these answers, I am asking too many questions, and things have moved too quickly in the time I have been away from direct teaching in K-12 education. But sometimes the soup slops into the other compartments of my head, like the bill pay area, or the when you stop by Staples buy a new mouse for the computer instead of wandering around like an idiot area.  I forget important things like that I am committed to daily exercise and my children need to eat three times a day, and a bag of Cheetos does not count for one of the three meals.

So now I can officially say…I am BACK.  I can say it because I am back with a VENGEANCE and with the sweet relief that comes from the end of the longest, hardest kind of journey you can imagine.  In fact, the last little leg of the journey turned out to be so tricky I wasn’t sure I would make it back, but yet here I am obsessing over the children in my classroom, planning lessons far into the night, and dreaming of making connections while showering and brushing my teeth.  I knew if I could get to this spot I would be like a woman possessed.  And so I am, the deep desire to help children learn pulsing through every part of my mind and body at work like a spiritual awakening in my soul.

And to be honest, I am somewhat terrified.   Twelve years ago when I left K-12 I did it with intention and as though someone was ripping out my heart.  I left to raise my family.  Having watched my parents lose their kids by becoming obsessed with running a church and leaving us to luncheons of Big Macs, I didn’t want to repeat their mistakes.  I LOVED teaching, but I needed to devot myself to raising my children and I knew the classroom would get in the way.  I left a school where I was a technology guru, teacher of the year, a short year from tenure, and on my way to teaching stardom to change diapers, and read Rollie-Polie-Ollie.  The first three years I cried on the first day in September when the kids went back to school and I went to the park with a stroller.

Don’t misunderstand I loved being home with my children, but there was no one there to cheer my victories, and no one applauding when I taught Elijah to use the potty or use two word combinations.  It was a labor of love, and the kind of sacrifice that no one can really ever understand because it was done privately behind the four walls of my house and only my husband and the three sweet babies we brought into the world were there as witnesses.  In time, I would find my work at the college to fulfill my need to teach in many ways, but still preparing future teachers is somehow different than teaching children yourself.  Still it was during these long wonderful, exhausting, and amazing years I learned balance.  I learned that I am a three part-person with a body, a mind, and a spirit, and that all three parts must be attended to for me to be healthy.

It’s hard to find balance when you are fanatical.  And yet, here I am ready to try.  To be honest the first week I was really worried.  I skipped working out three days in a row and was on my way to another day, before my blessed husband told me I was going to get a pot belly and drug me kicking and cursing into the gym.  Thankfully by the time we hit 40 minutes, I was drenched with sweat and felt the stress hormones replacing themselves with endorphins and remembered my groove.  OK, yes this is why I NEED to exercise, I am a better teacher, mother, wife, person when I get my body into motion.

And Friday night, just as all the sugar plums were tucked into bed, my oldest son’s questions about God and eternity, and if it is a sin to be tempted to call someone the F word when they have called you the F word 20 times in a row made me pause.  I sat on the edge of his bed and talked about God’s goodness and mercy and remembered the pain of middle school and how much I needed and still need the reassurance that there is a God and he is good in order to feel sane.

Finally a decade later, I get the pause.  If I had not stopped teaching K-12 I would already have the recipe to my literacy vegetable soup dilemma….but I would be LOST.  It is the balance that makes me able to CARE.  I care deeply and passionately out of a space of such personal joy and happiness.  I am so blessed to have a family who needs and loves me, a social network of friends who are genuinely happy to be near me, and a spiritual family who feeds my soul.  They are the fuel that fires my ability to teach with passion.  They are the broth for my soup, without them I would become dry and brittle.

I return to my soup…back to figuring out which kind of learning experiences work best for children.  How they should be grouped so I can use my assessments to meet them at individual levels?  And how can I make the environment so much fun they accept the invitation to learn.  But first, back to the dishes that need to be put away, church this morning where I will lift my hands in a prayer of thanksgiving to God, and an afternoon at Marine City with my children where I will build a sandcastle.  Late tonight after I worked out for an hour, and packed the bags for my two sons to go to summer camp, I will find my way to lesson plans…and somehow my crock pot soup will finally be ready to yield up its contents so that on Monday morning when I find my way to the classroom my students will be nourished by its richness