Commenter Thread

novakant - At least I feel on most days that I’m doing something useful, though I don’t really know what I’m doing yet.

I know a lot of teachers (myself included) with a decade or more of teaching experience that still feel like this - at least part of the time. We feel it less often, but it never quite goes away. We just get better at letting go of our expectations and more adept at flowing around the obstacles.

Every new class is a learning experience.

This may sound weird, but one thing I have been doing is planting trees. Not personally. We're in an apartment in campus managed housing, so our ability to do much of anything with our surroundings is highly limited. Nope, I've been donating monthly to One Tree Planted for most of the year, and they have been doing the planting for me in areas devastated by wildfires or desertification. By the end of the year I'll have planted 240 trees around the world.

It's a small thing, but it's something I can do without having to rely on a functioning government to sustain it, and it directly contributes to slowing down the damage we are doing with our other shortsightedness.