Don't get me wrong, I love and cherish working in the same building where my kids go to school. In many ways it makes the challenge of balancing work life and home life not just bearable, but enjoyable. It's also really hard. I'm late-or-nearly-late pretty much every day because of 1,000 different reasons no matter how early I wake up. I was awake at 4:45 this morning. Still late. And then--teacher friends, I know you'll get this--the 15 minutes before school starts are packed with little things to do to get ready for the day, and the kids are running around my room and asking me a million questions and worrying about forgotten items. Then at the end of the day, there's no quiet, reflective ride home. There's recorder-playing and crying and fighting over the front seat. It's just...stressful.
But then a lot of the time, the close living quarters of work and family is pretty fun. As the girls get older, I think they're figuring out what it means for me to be a math teacher (plus several other more ambiguous roles). They ask great questions and I have LOTS of fun making their homework take twice as long by making them think about all kinds of related concepts. This morning was the best, though. As usual, the girls were drawing and writing math problems on my board and Nellie made this: a "smiley face made of smiley faces."
I got to teach her all about fractals. I drew the Sierpinski triangle. I pulled out my fractal book. We talked about satellite images of earth and broccoli and mountain ranges. It was awesome.
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