This might be pretty easy to guess, but this week has been all sorts of crazy busy for me (whoa, backlog piling up) and it is also awesome.
I love teaching. Love love love love teaching. Love being in a classroom, love being in a school, love talking with professors, love talking about learning, about learning with technology, about helping students grow and about growing as a student myself - it fills me up and wears me out and makes me just... happy. At home in the center of a hurricane of motion.
I'm going to need to force myself to take a breather when the week is done - go home on Friday and actually sleep, and clean my room, and eat things, re-pack, take care of some stuff that isn't POSSE in my life (heck, some stuff that isn't work), but... mmm. I can't not do this. I must get better at it. Education, both in and out of the classroom, and in open communities of practice, is an art that I would like to master.
And that is precisely what I'm doing, and what I have been doing for the last several years. It's odd to think that I've been teaching for almost a decade now - I started the summer I was 15, running science and math camps with curricula I'd designed, although I didn't really catch the bug for another few years until my sophomore year at Olin when I became a TA.
[Talking about how I had a lousy, sleep-deprived, burnout-filled week my senior year of college, but then a few folks had dropped by and talked with me about engineering education...] I was still sleep-hazed, and my eyes still burned bleary, and I swayed when I stood, but oh, I felt good! Chandra grabbed me while Ryan and Jon went back to get food. “Promise me you’ll work on something with engineering education when you get out of here?”
“I think I have to,” I said. It makes me come alive.
-- sometime in March 2007 (The Mel is 20)
I don't know why. But oh, when I do it, it feels so good.