Letting Go

I'm learning of this process as I watch Elizabeth, my student teacher, take over my fourth grade class gradually. Right now she is teaching Bible and in charge of all the procedural things including lining kids up in the hallway and taking them to special classes like music. Next week, though, she takes over math, and then science and language arts. Then she'll be the full time teacher and I won't be needed anymore. Wow! Part of that sounds really enticing...what will I do all day long? Email many of you! Part of me, though, is already sad at this idea of losing contact with my students even if it is for only a few weeks. Hmm. I'm learning that letting go and letting someone else take over what I thought was "my" domain is harder than I thought. How can I teach Elizabeth to care for those kids' hearts like I do? How can I teach her to be creative and be sensitive to the kids' learning styles and quirkyness that allows them to succeed? These are questions I've been asking myself recently, and I come up with nothing. A healthy tension between Elizabeth and me needs to exist where she can function freely within my classroom boundaries. Yikes! I need to let her fail sometimes, reflect on her progress, make mistakes, and succeed, because someone did that for me not too long ago. It's just a hard thing to watch and I'm not to the point yet where I'm thankful this has come my way this semester. I've been reading Ecclesiastes for the past few weeks on the U-Bahn in the mornings on my way to school, and one piece of wisdom Solomon discovered in his life was that people come and go and are replaced. Such is life, people are dispensable. So how can I do my job well and still know that someone else could and probably will someday do it better than me? Tough questions to ponder. And with Baby Frank coming next spring, I will face this issue of letting go once again on a grander scale. Maybe God is prepping me for the next step. Letting go of teaching, for a while at least, for something He wants me to invest my time into. Wow. That's big. All for now!