If none of that rings a bell, go ahead and check out these series:

~~No worries, I’ll wait right here~~

….Welcome back! So yes, I have been creating materials, and working with other teachers to create materials that use RA for a while now. This is the part of teaching that I REALLLY like… CREATING. Thinking about topics that the textbook only touches oh so gently… and then doing a full bodied cannonball into the subject with authentic materials that show these issues in all their messy complexity.

“The semester like no other” is about to launch and I am teaching three sections of first semester intermediate Spanish from my basement. In my sweatpants. The creative stuff is what keeps me going. It gives me joy.

The world has blown up in the past few months/years. We have been reminded yet again of the structural racism that empowers the few and ignores, degrades, and even kills those who don’t have that same level of power and privilege.

So my choice? I’m not ignoring the world in which we live. I am teaching it.

What follows are a list of Radio Ambulante episodes that deal with the topic of racism… and several episodes have very specific connections to racism concerning latinx people in the United States. This “playlist” was curated by the RA team and is intended to be used by teachers for their classroom. My plan is to have my students listen to some/all of these episodes and then use them to talk about our own world. Since I teach in Maine, “Soy marrón” will be an obvious choice. “Confesión” is about racial profiling and wrongful imprisonment in Chicago. “Ciudad en dos” is about the awful shooting that happened at the Walmart in El Paso Texas on 3 August 2019.

These are beautifully crafted Spanish language stories that will inspire conversation. And yes, there are transcriptions in Spanish and translations in English available on the RA website.

(Click on image to access the playlist)

In my “spare time” (cough, sputter) I run two projects for RA for Teachers:

~The Teaching with Radio Ambulante private Facebook group where teachers (over 1300 at last count!) are sharing lesson plans and asking for help, support advice. Please consider joining, and remember to answer the membership questions (mention LLU too!)

~I write a bi-monthly newsletter for teachers who use/want to use RA in the classroom. It is open to everyone. Each newsletter features a teacher and his/her lesson plans, as well as a bunch of topic specific resources. You can sign up here.

The most recent issue specifically talked about teaching social justice and ideas for creating an anti-racist lesson plan. Here’s the link: http://tiny.cc/07xosz

These two projects give me joy and hope, mostly because I am constantly connecting with other language teachers who are creative, motivated, hopeful. Many of them are also eager to make their classrooms a place where students don’t avoid the reality of the world, rather, they have a place to discuss, share, and hopefully be motivated to make change happen in their communities.

I wish each of you strength, a sense of humor, and good health this academic year. We are gonna need it….

And it happened! And then it didn’t.

We got word that our semester was going to change abruptly around day 3 into the break. From then forward it was a non stop pursuit of ways in which we could morph our curriculum, rethink our course goals and just throw things out the window if need be.

Our school’s Ed Tech and IT and Library staff worked harder than ANY of us to make this happen. Having once been on that side of the “helpdesk” I can only imagine what was going on behind the scenes while they could still be in the same room and then when they had to social distance. I immediately wanted to bake a billion brownies for all of them to say thanks. Without these folks, distance learning simply would not have happened.

I have to admit, I did not attack therevamping my course immediately. For one, I wanted to know how my students were doing. Did they have a safe place to live and study for the next 8 weeks? Were they healthy? Where were they? Which time zones were they in? For my seniors, what extra support might they need (or better said: where could I cut them slack) as they tried to finish their senior year, find a job after college, and prepare for a very uncertain future while in the middle of quarantine. What’s the sense of planning three stellar *cough* online presentations per week to mimic our face to face reality if no one had the brain space, the time or the bandwidth to take that on?

I also wanted to weigh my tech options. Our school was not telling us what to do, which was good, but it also led to lots and lots of “let’s download this free app and hope for the best” from many faculty (the students were both under and overwhelmed). There were training sessions in Microsoft Teams. So much tech not much wow. I decided to stay with the almighty and unwieldy Blackboard (our campus CMS) and add Zoom. It was the least amount of tech, and also the most I could mentally fathom.

It turned out that while I was pondering this many of my colleagues in other disciplines were rapidly grabbing up students’ time online: Scheduling course meetings that went for 2 hours at a pop, or assigning work with hard deadlines that meant lots of on and offline work. Suddenly no one had any time and everyone had all the time in the world simultaneously. This struck me as somewhat crazy. I mean, hello? Aren’t we in a global pandemic? Life is happening all around us and don’t some of our students need space to cope? Faculty had already decided that grades would be P/F. I had presumed that meant we could lower the bar a little and give ourselves some space to think and grow vs race and memorize. I guess my view was not the predominant one and many students were tasked with jumping through virtual hoops for weeks…all for the sake of “learning.”

My class and I decided upon one hour a week to meet face to face, plus three writing assignments a week and one video/audio recording assignment. They were a particularly agile group of language learners and had already progressed way beyond what I thought they could do in the first half of the term, so it did not seem unreasonable to slow things down, review and reuse some of the language we had already studied, and still get to the finish line with a level of proficiency that would allow those that could to move on to the next level…whenever and however the next semester would come to pass.

So I should say right here that my home life was pretty calm and collected compared to those of my colleagues who were trying to juggle child care or schoolwork or taking care of sick parents. Aside from four-yes-four very spoiled and needy dogs who zoom-bombed far too many class sessions or virtual office hours than I am able to count, it was pretty easy going here. Once I stopped reading the news headlines and started listening to the peepers and the birds who were finally coming back to the feeders, my general sanity improved. My kids moved home and our internet handled it (5 people working remotely simultaneously). We did lose power a few times, one kid turned off the furnace by accident (thank you service person for NOT laughing at us when you discovered the problem in 2 minutes), the back up generator had a small fit but did come on during the last black out and our well pump died a dramatic death, but otherwise things were calm on the homefront. Oh and everyone here was healthy, thank god. We were lucky.

I am writing this after having just finished my last simultaneous online class for the term. Zoom fatigue is a real thing and I haz it. So do they. I am so glad this is coming to an end…for now.

Before I close down the term (and this post… courage, dear reader, it is coming to an end) I thought I should write down what worked and what didn’t. In case anyone is reading this and is interested but also because I may have to do this again next semester and need to remember.

Ugh. Onward.

Remember:

• Make sure your computer can handle all of this. My 5 year old MacBookAir really struggled with screen sharing and presenting and polling and and and… in zoom. I brought home my office machine (newer but still not powerful enough) and it also sputtered. So many minutes of my online classes were spent saying “whoops and now it is frozen, okay…plan B”
• Have a Plan B..and C.
• Faculty were (somewhat) trained about how to teach, but our students had no idea what to expect while learning. Be clear about the plan, the goals, the tasks. And what constitutes “participation.”
• Breakout rooms in zoom are great but you need a plan. Model, practice while all together, make the time in the rooms SHORT, and then be sure to include everyone when sharing back to the group. Have a “why” as well as a beginning, middle and end for these tasks. Otherwise it is just fancy busywork.
• Make time to quickly and informally check in with everyone at the start of each class. Have things changed since the last time we met? If so, how can I help or do you need to not be here right now? I did not obligate my students to come to the live classes (and I recorded them) but I asked them stay in touch. That helped.
• Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Sure I can stream audio and video via zoom and we can all listen/watch together. But is that the best use of our time together? And can my machine/network actually handle it? Can theirs?
• Don’t assume anything. My students would automatically join zoom calls and mute their mikes. I thought they were just being passive until I had them unmute their mikes and the cacophony of their homes was amazing (siblings also e-learning, rattling pots and pans, TVs blaring etc)
• Pivot. A lot. One of my colleagues in French was planning to teach a specific novel in her class and ditched it for Camus’ Le peste which worked brilliantly. We happened to be doing body parts and illness when our semester began again so we did a deep dive into different Spanish speaking countries’ responses to COVID-19 etc. Yay for synchronicity.
• Forget the virtual backgrounds. My students saw my house, my dogs, and my family during class. In one class they had to practice giving commands and cooking vocabulary to my son in Spanish in our kitchen in order to tell him how to make scrambled eggs. Best.class. ever.
• Remember that no one is doing a fabulous job right now. If they say they are then they are fibbing. And yet no one talks about their glorious failures either (which is why we all think we are failures right now). People who do this kind of teaching for a living often have had lots of training or have systems in place specifically for this purpose. If this semester felt like it was being held together with duct tape and twist ties, it probably was but hey that’s as good as it gets for right now. Don’t beat yourself up. Have a cup of tea (or stronger) and binge watch Bob’s Burgers for a few hours. Be kind to yourself.

I am sure there is more and if there is I will add it later. But for now I am going to get ready for their oral exit interviews/ sendoffs. It all feels so hollow and yet I know we accomplished a good amount. I look forward to the day that I can physically see these folks again and can give them a hug and say thanks for hanging in there.

Until that time, I am just hoping spring comes to this part of the world…and soon!

So many things have prevented me from getting back to this space. Self doubt and imposter syndrome have been the main culprits here, not a lack of time or space to write. No, in fact, where I am now in my tiny life I am lucky to say I have both of those things and feel very fortunate in that regard. But regardless, self doubt and “do I really have anything to say?” has plagued me for many months.

Until I just decided to plow ahead. I realized one morning that I miss writing. I like writing. I like what I write. So… here we go!

Sure, I don’t have to be writing in a public space… but I know myself. Writing here gives me an added push to write clearly, and to finish what I started. Goodness knows I have scratch pads and scraps of paper everywhere with incomplete thoughts and scribbles and whatnot. This place, I hope, will let me pull them together and make sense of them.

I have “retired” from the world of language learning technology (and happily so) and now am a almost-full time college level language teacher. I still have my issues with and questions about language technology, and those will pop up here on occasion. I plan to write a bit about teaching in a liberal arts college (also my alma mater which continues to be…weird), teaching language as a non-native speaker, teaching listening (always!), and the work I am doing with teachers who use/want to use Radio Ambulante with their students (aka my happy place).

I am doing this for me and for my need to keep writing. I do hope others (hello dear reader) enjoy what comes out. But if not, that’s okay. Comments always welcome. Encouragement deeply appreciated.

Here’s hoping the next time I log in it doesn’t take 20 tries

Looking back on it now I can see why it happened… I was starting a new job and it was an anxious time.  Let’s face it: it -is- an anxious time for anyone in Academia who is not tenured.  I am an experienced classroom teacher but I also one of the (growing?) numbers of teachers for whom teaching is a constant dance with anxiety. That’s not something that’s easy to admit, but I have been pleasantly surprised to learn how many of my colleagues feel the same way.  And yet we all make it look like teaching is the most natural thing in the wooooooorld.  It’s not.

Oh if my students only knew

During my font fiasco, I realize now that I had convinced myself that by micromanaging every facet of my class I was somehow gaining more control over that anxiety.  In actuality, the opposite was happening. Why? Well, I can be my own worst critic (shocking, I know). And as my worst critic,  I convinced myself that if my presos worked then it was just blind luck, that I was just fortunate that day, but next time it would be different.  The reckoning was coming!  So down the rabbit hole I would go…doubting myself with the fury of a thousand suns, and digging myself deeper into an anxious mess of hyper-prep and yes, gasp, even the occasional fotocopied cloze passage workbook exercises (Blasphemy!)

Finally it all came tumbling down.  I was spending inordinate amount of time tweaking the presentations and yet had completely lost track of the goals and the objectives for the class.  I was exhausted, overwhelmed, frustrated and ultimately angry with myself for falling into the biggest trap out there: the trap that as a language teacher you can actually control how and when your students learn…that you are the funnel of knowledge and they are the humble recipients.  Just typing that makes me feel sad and angry at myself.

But the good thing about teaching, or at least the way I teach, is that change and adjustments and admitting your humanity is always possible.  This was something I needed to change and once the self-flagellation stopped, I made some adjustments.

• Take the 20,000 foot view of whatever you are doing in your classroom.  While focusing on the micro is important, it can also be a trap.  I am working on reminding myself that keeping my students abreast of WHERE we are going is as important as HOW we get there.  Even if this means explicitly telling my class (and myself) at the beginning of class what the objectives for the day are going to be.  I can’t assume they know what’s in my head at the beginning of class.
• Endings are as important as beginnings.  I find that I plan the start of my classes really well and then the end of class… just sort of happens.  For my sake as well as that of my students, I need to make sure we have endings too.
• Remember the 4/5 rule.  That is, if you divide your class into 5 chunks or content areas, the last “chunk” should not contain new material.  It should be for consolidating, reviewing, and winding down.  Also for looking forward, but definitely it is not the time to start something new (research upholds this idea: students tend to remember best what happens at the beginning of class and at the end of class)ter
• Don’t be afraid to backtrack and recycle vs steamrolling ahead.  Teaching with a textbook this semester (reluctantly), I see how easy it is to get sucked into that vortex of “we need to get to chapter 6….or else.”  The reality is that even though I might get to chapter 6  the content might not be acquired by my students because I might be rushing to the finish line. And the reality is when they start up in the next class next semester, there is always a period of review and catch up built-in.
• Get feedback from students.  I still do periodic informal evaluations and then share the results with the class.  I don’t make all the changes they suggest, but certainly try to get to the ones that seem to be popular and then check in as to how it is going.

Taking the long view vs micromanaging is hard, I will admit it. It takes patience and restraint (something I seem to have in short supply as the semester grinds down).

Would love to hear from others how they balance the short term with the long view.  I’m pretty sure this is something we all face at different times in our classes. Please leave a comment and let us know how you balance between the two!!

Much has happened since that last post.

• I have moved to a new state. It has snow. Lots of it.
• I “retired” from my previous job.  They offered buyouts.  I said yes.  No regrets, although saying goodbye to a place where I worked for 18 years had its challenges.
• I now live with my 94 year old mother and my sister and her dog, but my life now mostly revolves around my 94 year old mom.
• My husband and best friend are 900 miles away (each in different directions).  This is not fun but I am grateful for my unlimited data plan.
• I have started a new job.  I am a teacher vs a teacher and administrator/ tech wrangler in higher ed.
• I do not miss the administratrivia one single bit. Nor the technology that was wrangled.
• I love being a teacher.
• I am teaching at the same place from which I graduated college.  In the same department in which I majored.  This is a source of my constant confusion (Which decade is this?)  When the coffee shop on campus plays “classic rock” music I am completely and totally lost.
• I have volunteered to be a mentor for a fellow language professional who works elsewhere in the country through the ACTFL mentoring program.  At first as was the world’s worst mentor on the face of the planet…. I didn’t check in, I hated the conference calls (50 people on the same call? My new definition of hell), I got overwhelmed by stuff in my own life (I felt like I was the one who needed a mentor!). I was filled to the brim with self doubt and the ever familiar  imposter syndrome (who the heck do you think you are pretending to be someone’s mentor???)  But now? We talk every week and while I cant speak for her I have found these meetups encouraging, supportive, and fun.  It’s really great to feel like you are not alone out there.
• I was selected to be join the Inaugural Teaching Center Faculty Fellows at the new college where I work. It comes with a stipend and money to put towards teaching resources.  So far we haven’t done any heavy lifting but apparently my project is going to be thinking about ways to Unlearn Spanish.  Yeah…that sounds about right….
• I got to spend a few days in NYC in January with my colleagues from Radio Ambulante  to talk about teaching and supporting teachers who use the podcast for teaching.  Every time I get to spend time with them I just pinch myself. What an amazing group they are and how lucky I am to be a part of that team.
• I still love being a teacher (in case you were wondering if that would change in the last 20 or so lines ago), although I realize every day how hard it is to teach and how much energy it saps from me at the end of the day.  As I write I am in my pajamas.  It is 5:30 p.m.
• I found a pool (the local Y).  I continue to listen to podcasts while swimming and cherish my underwater solitude and personalized storytelling (I tell myself that they are talking just to meeeeee)
• Higher ed is a very, very strange place.
• My sister has learned how to brew beer. This is a VERY good thing.
• I have acquired a deep and abiding love for the TV show The Incredible Dr Pol (did I mention I live with a 94 year old?  That is code for  the TV is always on)
• I learned how to snow-shoe and how to cross country ski this winter.  When in Rome….
• I have taken skating lessons.  My knees are not pleased with me but I plan to keep practicing.
• This post is being written as part of the Faculty Diversity 14 day writing challenge.  I have signed up to write for 30 minutes every day, with the hope of producing one blog post a week.  So, with their prompts and an ounce of hope…. I should be back and blogging regularly.  Fingers crossed!

Readers of LLU know that I chafe at projects that have goals like “mastery of the preterite and the imperfect” or “finally figure out how to use the imperfect subjunctive.” In my mind to think about grammatical forms without considering the conversational context into which they are used defeats the purpose of the project. Also language isn’t like other subjects where if you master one form then the next one automatically falls into place.  There is a lot of cycling forward and cycling backwards in language learning…it’s evolutionary. It’s slow. Language is social and it is contextual and acquisition evolves based upon the ways it is used and with whom it is used. Personally I think the whole idea of mastery in a language is problematic… there is always more to learn in a language (even in my home language). But I will save that for future blog posts.

This semester, I tried to do things a bit differently and more efficiently. 
Over the years I have found that the process of defining a project takes my students many weeks. And many times that is lost time, time that could have been better spent working towards goals vs crafting goals. So this year I made my course “consent only” (students had to ask for my approval to register) and the consent was given if they could tell me, in 100 words or less, what they wanted their personal project to be for this class.

Some students fell by the wayside immediately (as in, they never submitted anything). Perhaps this was -not- what they wanted to be doing in a Conversation class. So be it. But those that did write something did so thoughtfully and even passionately. The ideas ranged from being able to talk about baseball in the Dominican Republic (because the student plays on our Varsity team and is working a t a youth baseball camp in the DR this summer), to preparing for an interview to be a bilingual medical scribe, to attending a Filmmaker’s Workshop in Mexico, to helping first generation Latinx students (and their parents) navigate FAFSA in Spanish. And once they were “consented” into my course, they were encouraged to begin to identify resources, make plans etc in order to jump into action once the semester began. For many of them by the time of our first meeting they were well underway.

The second change I made was to ask students to create project benchmarks based on the NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do statements

If you are not familiar with these standards, no worries, you are not alone. Try as ACTFL and others might, our textbooks and technologies often give nothing more than lip service to them. The idea is pretty simple: take the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines and put them in the hands of the students. Instead of me as the teacher telling my students what they can or will be able to do, they tell me what they can do. And in the case of my class, what they want to be able to do in the language regarding their project before the end of the semester.

Below is how I presented the assignment to the students, as well as example of what a project might look like. The items on the left are the goals, and students were asked to chart when they began to work towards those goals, when they felt like they were gaining control of those skills, and by what date they felt they had achieved secure mastery.

I would check in with students periodically during the semester and ask them to complete their grids at certain times of the year. I also asked them to self-assess based upon their progress at the midterm mark. You might think that, given the opportunity, everyone would give herself an A. In actuality, I had many C’s and B-‘s.  The reason: they realized how much work there was to be done, and that they needed to apply more time and energy consistently over time to make that happen.  It was not, as one student told me, like writing a paper or taking a test where you cram and get it done and hand it in and then  it’s over.  The personal project for HISP 303 was slow, methodical, gradual… it took time and patience and perseverance. And unlike a paper or an exam…language acquisition is never, ever truly over.  There is always more to learn and say and do in the language.

I invite you to take a look at the pdf and let me know your thoughts. This is the last time I am teaching this course where I currently teach (see this post for more details) so I welcome comments, suggestion and ideas that I can use to make this course even better when I teach it in the near future at another school.

(Download the PDF here)

It is mid April.  We have three weeks left in the semester –upon mentioning this the other day I actually had a Senior burst into tears. Stress is high, the weather is hot-cold-rainy-snowing-sleet, papers and projects are coming due, and people are crawling to the finish line.

Sounds like a PERFECT time to create a speaking assignment with Eurovision Song Contest music videos!

Thanks to the lovely folks at What Else is On TV and their amazing knowledge of all things Eurovision, I asked them for a selection of videos of past present/contestants where the song was in a language other than English. My idea was to have my students choose their favorite video and tell a fantastic (in all senses of that word) story, in Spanish, about what they thought was going on.

We practiced in class with Edurne’s 2015 entry for Spain.  The tired, the cranky and the stressed out members of my class erupted in laughter…. incredulous about what they were watching.  I know, I know…this video is pretty gosh darn terrific on SO many levels.

Here is the playlist I created for them. The assignment is this:  Using a variety of tenses (as appropriate) and a varied vocabulary, choose one video  and create a story.  Talk about the artist, the song they are singing and what it means, what the artist did before Eurovision and where they are going after winning the competition…. as creative as you want to be!

I look forward to listening what they create!  And in the meantime I am watching more and more videos and avoiding those files that need to be organized that are sitting over there ————————–>

Happy Friday!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VazCscrVkeE

I resurrected my Google Voice account (that could be a blog post unto itself about trying to figure out what the number was in the first place…) and changed the settings so that when a VM came in it would alert my gmail account, and would not ring my cellphone. I then gave the Google Voice number to my students and asked them to call me.

This is the busiest time of the year,  I have discovered that asking students to do weekly face-to-face checkins with me about their projects is impossible to schedule. So instead, I have asked them to send me a voicemail and tell me, in Spanish, how they are progressing on their projects and what are they listening to as part of their daily listening practice.

I acknowledge their calls by opening up google voice on my computer and texting a message back, asking them questions or commending them on something they said.  So far, it has worked perfectly.  I will keep you posted!

Readers of LLU know that my students have been very lucky to be selected to do a radio show for our college station  –in Spanish– each week as part of our conversation class. Each week a pair of students volunteer to be DJs and choose the theme for the show. Their classmates make 2 minute recordings about the topic (example: the best mistake you ever made) and those are included in the show.  Students also make all of the Station IDs, bumpers, and PSAs.  And music…always music.

The week before spring break is hard: midterms, illness, frayed nerves, bad weather, exhaustion…. and people who can’t make their weekly radio shows. One day a DJ asked for a sub on a Thursday at 1. I volunteered.

Something you might know about me: I am by nature an introvert.  The act of teaching a class is hard for me and many are the days in which I want to just crawl inside of myself and hide vs standing in the front of a classroom.  So somehow I found myself volunteering to be DJ, all by myself, on live radio. Oh and did I mention that I would be doing a “special edition” of our weekly radio show and do this in Spanish?  What was I thinking?

Yeahhh…terrifying.

The night before the show I did not sleep well.  I had a very vivid dream that I showed up late, that I had the day wrong, that I froze and couldn’t talk on the air.  I had many second thoughts and toyed with the idea of trying to hand the show off to someone else. But the bottom line was this:  if I ask this of my students on a weekly basis, surely I could ask this of myself.  Besides…what could go wrong?

(I need to stop asking myself this…because…well..)

Given that earlier this month we celebrated #DayWithoutaWoman, I decided to make a special edition of our show dedicated just to women artists singing in Spanish.  I added the recordings of my women students (their PSAs, bumpers, Station IDs) when possible.  I created a playlist in Spotify and when it would cooperate added the students recordings so I could play the audio from one source (this proved to be clunky so I had to switch back and forth between Spotify and iTunes).

Things went well.  Until they didn’t.

The DJ for the next show didn’t appear.  I waited, I played the news, I search for a few new songs…I emailed the sub list.  Nothing. By the 20 minute mark it was clear my show had just been extended.  So I scrambled to add songs and recordings on the fly while trying not to have dead air (more than 3 seconds of dead air= an FCC fine).  I called the sublist but no one picked up.  I logged my songs. I finished the hour.

And then it happened again.  The second DJ did not show.  More frantic emails.  More songs (but trying to be mindful not to have more than two songs by the same artist or three songs from the same album within an hour…another FCC rule).  Played the news, several times.  Walked through the station…empty.

Finally 2 hours and 35 minutes into what was supposed to have been a 1 hour show, I had to go.  I shut down the transmitter and had to walk away.

Thankfully another DJ answered my call for help and came in about 20 minutes later. WOBC was back on the air.

The good news?  I was able to face my fears and did something I had (almost) convinced myself I couldn’t do. In fact, by about the middle of hour 2 I felt myself move from terrified to “I can do this.”   And in retrospect, I think it ended up being pretty decent show.

Below is the Spotify playlist of the show. I managed to get some of the students’ recordings in there as well. I have the audio from the actual radio show and I might add it later (for giggles) but for now you, dear readers, will probably find this playlist more interesting and entertaining…. ENJOY!

[ Featured image is a pic I took of what the console at WOBC looks like. I was going to use an image of a refrigerator magnet I know well with the quote “do one thing every day that scares you” … until I dug deeper and found out that this quote has been incorrectly connected to Eleanor Roosevelt and should instead by credited to Mary Schmich. #themoreyouknow ]

Change happened fast. 5 months later we found ourselves in a tiny midwest college town with boxes and young kids, a minivan and a dog and guinea pigs. I found a job at the local small college and my husband was working up the road for a local not for profit.

Every time the Academy Awards come around we ask ourselves that same question: “I wonder where we will be this time next year.”  When we first arrived we did as many do…we promised to give this place 2-3 years and then head back. But that was over 15 years ago.  We stayed, we sprouted roots, the kids grew up, went to school and moved out, we made friends, we celebrated marriages, we mourned deaths, we became a part of the community. We still have dogs, and we still watch the Academy Awards.

This year when we watched, we knew that asking that question was going to result in a different answer. While we aren’t moving, we know that next year will be different in a lot of ways. We might be here when the Oscars happen, but then again we might not. Or we might  be in different places. It’s not entirely clear. With aging parents always on our mind, we knew that there were many trips to Florida (his mom) and Maine (my mom) on the horizon and when we could get time off from work.

Here is what is clear: last winter the college where I work offered some of the employees the opportunity of a voluntary separation plan: if your age + the number of years of service = 75 or more… you were eligible to apply for the separation plan. This, my friends, is the only lottery I have ever won.

Another bit of math: my mother is 93 and my sister lives with her in Maine and has taken care of her for 2 years now. My job has, up until now, prevented me from helping them out long term. Winning the “lottery” meant that I could actually make that happen.

Here’s my news for this snowy Tuesday morning: I am leaving my current job in June and going to Maine to help my sister with our mom. I am not retiring, as much as I am taking some time off. I have accepted a part time job (1 course per semester) at a college in Maine where I will be teaching Spanish. It would mean I would be able to keep doing what I like (teaching) while helping my mom age in place.

I will write more about this new (and I’ll admit it: scary) period in my work life in future posts.  People have been asking things like: How did I know it was time to go? Why didn’t I wait until our college had a new administration? (back story: we are hiring a President) What would the college need to do to get you back? (oh boy…)

Am I retiring? Nope.  Am I taking a giant leap and trying something new?  Yep.  Stay tuned.

Featured image: by “So upward, onward I thrust,” by Sage Solar, (CC BY 2.0)

Featured image: by “Changes” by  Carsten ten Brink,   CC by-NC-ND 2.0