This has been a big year for me. I got married, went on a 6 week honeymoon to Europe and saw sights I had only imagined I would ever be lucky enough to see. I have entered a period of relative stability in my relationships and home life and so it seems that things are changing at work.
Just before I left school to get married (start of term 2) the AP I have been working under in my curriculum innovations role, got a new position at a new school, and gave 1 month's notice. This meant that before I even returned from my honeymoon, he would be gone. I knew that due to this, the first couple of weeks after my return would be full of catching up on my behalf - working out what had gone on whilst I had been gone and what this meant for me and my position.
It seems that what it means is a renewal of sorts; a rethinking and reimagining of what it is that I want my role to be. This has been reinvigorating, remotivating and exciting. There is much to be done. I am working on a new job description, imagining what it is that I want to be doing around the school for the next 3 years. I am imagining what the school will look like in a year when the new building is finished, and what the new curriculum that we are intending to introduce at Year 7 will look like. I am meeting with the acting AP and with the Principal about what our visions are for this new curriculum in this new building and I feel like everything is new again.
I am now one of the few people who has worked on this project from the start and this gives me an autonomy that I have not had before in my projects at school. I am able to work with the larger school community to gather ideas, formulate theories and to create something from scratch. Something that I feel will be the start of bigger changes, whole school changes, not necessarily in what we teach but in how we teach it and why. Changes to the leadership structures and to the way we have always done things, not because we can, but because it is time to rethink the things we have always done in the light of where we want to be at the end of the journey.
When we were on our way home from our honeymoon, I started our 'post-wedding budget.' This is a three year plan that I have since realised is almost like a 'strategic-plan' in that it is designed to get us where we want to be in 3 years time, with various milestones and achievements along the way. This is not because of my fear of uncertainty (my fatal flaw) but rather because I believe that if you set goals and a way to work towards them, even if they are not all achieved on time and on budget, you will have come much further than those that don't even dare to dream.
To this end I am also intending to go back to uni. It is something I have always wanted to do but the potential finanical burden was always what put me off. And it never seemed like a good time. I feel like this next three years, with my planning at home and at school, is the perfect time to do it and I happened to find out about a scholarship that is available that will allow me to do it without putting a dent in our 'post-wedding' budget.
Sometimes you go through periods of time where everything seems to just work out for you and go in your favour. I used to think I lived a semi-charmed life and in some ways it is true that I do. I have never had to endure what I consider to be great hardships in life but I have also learned that most of the things that I felt just 'fell in my lap' came after considerable planning or hard work on my behalf but that I never really connected the work with the end product. Now I am at a stage in my life where I not only am ready to reap the benefits of my hard work but I am also ready to knuckle down to the next stage of hard work because the dreaming about what I want the reward to be at the end is worth all the effort that goes into its making.
