Just Thinking....

I figure I've already lived a good bit of my life. In that time I've experienced quite a few historic events, some of which changed life as humanity has known it. I was sitting here today, thinking of how my own personal perspectives have been changed by personal milestones, pitfalls, triumphs, mistakes, successes, and hurts. How beliefs I once thought were fundamental truths turned out to only be edicts imposed upon me by my upbringing, but that living my life has since shifted, altered, or shattered altogether.

Church and religion (not God) has become very personal, no longer a group effort. Don't need to belong to the club to reap the benefits of having faith. Now it's more about concentrating on being the best person I can be, staying true to my own heart, and doing what I can to bring joy and/or comfort into the lives of others. I keep my promises, respect my fellow man, know where to turn when my back is against the wall, and where to send my thanks when life is good.

Marriage, relationships between husbands and wives, I continue to scrutinize and evaluate. As a wife, I've adjusted, shifted, accommodated,tolerated and acclimated. I was brought up to believe that girls grew up and got married, but over the years I've grown uncertain about the need for marriage in general. I find myself wondering if the expectation of eternal fidelity are archaic and unrealistic. Once the initial passion wears off, do young people today have what it takes to stick to the promises they made? Judging by those who came before them and the examples they're bombarded with in the media, probably not. Why do we believe in fairy tales? Dreams do come true, but there's some work that has to go into that. Sometimes it turns out that the end isn't worth the means, and that's reality. Why should people be made to feel like failures because they faced the truth of a situation and opted out?

And I laughed at how I once thought people without children in the home couldn't possibly be happy. Now that's one of my youthful assumptions that got completely altered. The empty nest isn't that bad, in fact, it's rather peaceful and serene, particularly now that the chicks are independent, productive members of society who live in their own nests. I love them, and I'm proud of them, but I'm happy to be at this place in my life.

In my professional capacity,over the years, I've continuously modified my expectations of my students (sadly, it's becoming more like lowered my expectations), as well as pondered what is relevant and irrelevant about the content I teach. I am a Reading teacher to 8th graders. (Believe, me, though there is the need.) I'm fighting the battle of print over LCD, and the effect that reading from the screen has on reading static print from the page. It matters because most standardized tests, the ruler which our children are measured, are usually given in the form of static print. Handwriting, a near and dear to my heart, has sadly gone by the wayside, and I'm beginning to wonder if teaching writing conventions is headed that way, too. With so many gadgets and devices allowing for shortcuts and providing built-in crutches, even adults seem to be having trouble constructing a proper sentence, much less in cursive script. I mean, who really "writes" anything anymore beyond signing one's name, making lists, or jotting notes? Who needs to know nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, gerands, and so on and so on when a machine will be doing the bulk of the writing and the spelling and grammar checks?

Just rambling here, but I do wonder....