I think in this diary entry I am going to reflect about the course and how I have seen myself evolve in the last fourteen weeks.
I came into the course after leaving a very unsuccessful job, my first job as a teacher.  I felt inadequate, disillusioned, and just plain out of sorts with the whole educational picture, and moving into my dream of becoming a teacher was more cloudy then it had been.  The funny thing is that I took the course because I wanted to.  I wanted to expand myself and accomplish what I did not feel like I could accomplish on my own.  On my own I felt like I was a failure and unable to meet the responsibilities and the challenges that lay ahead of me.  Since I have been delving into this class and pushing myself each week to take this to the deepest level that I could take it, I find that the opposite is true.  I can not give more than I am to any one.  If I am giving all that I am and it is not enough then there is an inherent problem in that.  I feel like I was inadequately prepared to take on the teaching role as early as I did, but I feel like I fell into traps not only with my students who played on my naivety but with myself.
I felt overpowered by the situation that I was in.  I felt that I did not have a place for my voice, and when my voice was heard it was seen as disobedience and was judged harshly.
I felt like I was talking to walls that only took in what they wanted to hear, and if you spoke something other than that there was just coldness and distance.  I speak now out of my desire to find myself again.  In the process of healing from becoming a teacher, and I do believe that any animal including a human when they break out of a cocoon there is adjustments that have to be made.  They never report how many times the butterfly hit the wall in its approach to land on the flower.
I am extremely proud of the work that I have demonstrated in the last fourteen weeks, and I hope to get to a place with in myself that I feel more solid with my teaching, so that the next experience I can focus on the imagination and innovation I know I carry instead of the inadequacies and struggles I spent as I tried to learn to discipline my students.
Was I wrong in the way that I acted as a teacher? Of course, I was wrong. I acted out of stupidity and stumbling but is that a reason to isolate myself and become less than who I know I am?  No.  I know the truth about myself and that is I will put a hundred percent in what ever I do and then some.  I guess the secret to all this mess is just learning that its enough. 
How do you get that as a teacher?  How do you get knowing you did your best when there is still so much more to do?  How do you feel good about what you accomplished in a year without putting down what you did not accomplish?
All of this is part of my unfoldment in regaining my power as a powerful leader, and regaining my desire to move forward and teach again.

Page Author: Danielle Earley
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