One of the things we’ve committed to this year is teachers presenting portfolios of their work over the course of the year. I’ll be honest, I didn’t look forward to this and thought that it would be one more task on an already too long list of things to do.

I was wrong. This presentations have been powerful and I’ve left each of them with new questions for myself.

Yesterday Captain America presented. His impressive and thoughtful presentation left me with the following thought: there’s a difference between learning to let go and achieving balance in your teaching practice.

Letting go is looking at the forty thousand things you might do as a teacher and knowing that you can’t do them all; what I’ve not quite learned is how to let go of these things. I still feel guilty, looking at various things that should have gotten done that simply have not gotten done and that given that there are only 168 hours in a week, will never get done.

Balance, then, is what happens when you figure out what you can do after you’ve let go of things. New teachers who haven’t figured out what to let go of, who are just trying not to drown.

I hope teachers realize that you can’t achieve balance until you know what you’re trying to balance. I also hope they realize that these are two separate skills for teachers to develop and maintain as they continue to teach.