Specializing

The last month or so has been humbling. I have taught only classes I like to teach. I have taught students who were nothing but remarkable. However, the teaching schedule wore me down more than I can remember being worn down, and with eight weeks left I feel as tired as I normally feel after a whole school year.

To make a long story short, I taught AP level classes in two fairly different disciplines within Social Studies. In so many ways, spending a whole with AP upperclassmen is a remarkable pleasure and privilege. Yet the challenge of preparing for the intellectual rigor in those two areas was fatiguing. And the experience makes me wonder if I need to make a tough call: specializing in one of those topic areas, forfeiting the privilege of teaching the other.

My whole career I've avoided teaching the same subject or class throughout a whole day. Some teachers strive for that, I found it tedious and boring. So as often as possible I have requested schedules that avoided that sameness. Perhaps I need to push for sameness and push for ways to become very, very good within consistency rather than fancy myself as an Advanced Placement utility infielder.

Deciding to specialize involves taking risk. It involves deliberately taking one fork in a road, and forfeiting the opportunities that might come from proceeding the other direction. Have I been postponing a decision I should have made long ago?

A dilemma with a career like this one, where the ladder up which one advances is nebulous (one is a teacher, a department chair, or a principal . . . there aren't too many other rungs), is that the signs of when one is stalled or when one is advancing are hard to discern. There aren't too many guides for the fifteen-year veteran teacher about what paths to take.