I’ve been in a slump lately. There is no use in denying it. Basically, from the time I’ve finished student teaching until now, I’ve been unproductive and restless. I’ll have occasional bouts of productivity but nothing like what I usually am. However, instead of just sitting around and accepting the fact that I’m in a slump while hoping I might snap out of it, I’m going to figure out why I’m acting this way and how to break out of it.
Student teaching was a very stressful time for me. Any education student or teacher can tell you about their student teaching days and they will all have the same hue of exhaustion and excitement. I would get up at 4:00 a.m. everyday, spend about two hours planning, grading and just getting ready for the day. By 7:00 or 7:15 I would be at school and I would stay there until about 3 o’clock teaching 7 sections of two different subjects. I’d get back to my apartment by 3:30 and usually take a nap before making dinner and working on my planning for the next day. Early on I did a good job of working out consistently, but that slowly fell by the wayside as I got more in depth to student teaching. I would usually work on school stuff until 10:30 or 11 before finally hitting the hay. Many of my weekends consisted of driving two hours each way to visit my girlfriend attending another university. I’m not giving you this rundown in hopes of eliciting sympathy; I knew what I was getting myself into and I was absolutely fine with it. I just want to give you a taste of what my days were like for approximately four months.
During student teaching I had to be productive. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be prepared to teach my classes. I quickly discovered that there is no parallel to not being prepared to teach. I didn’t have a problem staying prepared and putting in the work to pass student teaching. I was serious about doing student teaching well, this is my profession after all, and I think I did a pretty good job.
Once student teaching ended, I had an incredible surfeit of time. I no longer had to get up at 4 o’clock or spend hours planning lessons. My focus changed from, “What am I teaching today?” to “Woah, I kind of need a job.” When the focus is just on teaching, I have plenty to concentrate on and plenty to do. With finding a job, there are stretches of tedious application filling and resume mailing followed by waiting. The reward when you’re teaching is actually getting into the classroom and teaching your lesson. The reward when you’re trying to find a job is an undetermined amount of time into the future, if at all.
It doesn’t help that I think I also deluded myself in how hard it was going to be to find a job. Everything I’ve ever done has always come relatively easily to me. I don’t mean to say that I’ve skated through life, I definitely work hard. It’s just that anything I put my mind to I tend to get done. For some reason I was thinking that somehow the job of my dreams was going to fall into my lap. The reality of the situation is that the job market in my area is abysmal and my optimism has never been lower.
I really don’t like how this whole post is turning into a “woe is me” type story, but I really think that this has been the basis of my current slump. If I’m going to break out of it, I need to be honest with myself.
I’m going to wrap this post up now and save the portion where I figure out how to get back to normal for another time. I left you at a cliffhanger, right? I know you are just dying to find out what happens 
About wanting things to come naturally – I’ve felt that all too well (see here), and I commiserate with that feeling. It really is hard getting adjusted from student teaching back to “normal life” – even though there’s really nothing normal about it – probably more than it was getting used to being in the classroom all day (at least, it was for me).
Keep on keeping on. Finding a job helps, and keeping yourself occupied with whatever you can – catch up on professional reading, look into resources, keep persevering at the job hunt – will help get you out of that slump.
You can do it.
Like many, maybe most, things in life your attitude will dictate how you approach tasks. As a student and then a student-teacher your task is well defined and your method of attack prescribed. You can focus your energy on being the best student and/or student teacher….now become the best teaching-job hunter that you can be. You need to change your attitude so that you put the same energy you did into being an excellent teacher into finding and obtaining the best teaching job you can. Develop a game plan…use your network….document your efforts.
If it were easy it wouldn’t be worthwhile.
“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you… we are in charge of our Attitudes.”
Charles R. Swindoll