Taking care of myself

I am a creature of routine.

When I started student teaching back in 2000, I weighed over 300 pounds. I had a lot of fun in college, but the lifestyle did not agree with my health. As a post-graduate student teacher, though, I sort of learned how to live healthily. I learned how to eat and how to exercise. I lost 40 pounds in each of the next three years, getting me down to a svelte 195 by 2002. I'm no longer there, but hope to be there again someday.

From August 6th until, well, the Barack Obama trip last weekend, I went to the gym every single day. Generally that was between 5:30 and 7:30am in the morning, at the Stadium Place YMCA. If I ever missed, I would go in the evening, something that I hate because it takes up the entire evening. I was feeling great.

However, in the last week, I've let laziness creep into my routine and have eschewed the morning gym trip in favor of a couple extra hours of sleep. Today, I pushed the outer limit of my wakeup time, not getting my butt out of bed until nearly 7:15. The lack of everyday exercise compounds the exhaustion I feel in the mornings, and it turns into a cycle that I can't wiggle out of.

My lessons have still felt strong lately. I spent some days of reflection in deciding how I wanted to structure my Romeo and Juliet unit, and now feel pretty good about it; I put fingers to keyboard tonight and planned out every class period until Election Day. My Juniors, a class that is finding new ways to disappoint me this year (there are, literally, still over 10 kids who are not reading, and might just be waiting for their reports card failures to start, I don't know), seem like they're doing well in class; hopefully these presentations at the end of the week are good (and hopefully those essays they turned in last week are readable). So, things are feelign good in that regard.

Still, I've got to start gettign back into my routine, so everything starts feeling good. If I'm not taking care of myself, then I just can't be a good teacher.