Recently, I have been considering becoming a National Board Certified Teacher. For those of you who are not in the education field, this pretty much means that you do a whole bunch of work and take a few tests over the course of a year or two in hopes of passing the tests and work to get a raise in your salary. The idea seems like a good one, but for some reason I just can't seem to get it together.
Ever since I graduated college (and perhaps more specifically high school), I feel like I have really fallen off the successful, intelligent, hard-working, over-achiever map. My high school career was chalked full of an endless number of ridiculously unnecessary awards and achievements. I made all A's, took every AP class ever, joined clubs, excelled at sports, and everything in between. It was exhausting. It was time-consuming. It was addictive. It was more than any teenager should ever have to juggle all at once. Nonetheless, I succeeded with lots of trophies and a flawless transcript as proof. It was good. I guess.
I then went on to college to do pretty much the same thing as high school. However, I was at UA Fort Smith which most people discount as being worthy of mention when it comes to recounting where you graduated from. I was a Lion and not a Razorback or Sooner or Hurricane or some other mascot from schools so prestigious and terrible at sports that I am not even familiar with their mascot. I think my decision to go to UA Fort Smith was the beginning of me accepting that it was my decision alone to enter myself in the race that all of my friends from high school were in. I was okay with wanting to be a teacher and a coach, as opposed to getting numerous degrees and travelling abroad and going to graduate school. I was okay with not having a cool response to rattle off when I ran into a kid from Southside who had sat next to me in all of our AP classes. I was okay with it.
Even though I went to UA Fort Smith, I still achieved and did well. I maintained most of my over-achiever mentality and accomplished everyting I wanted to accomplish. When I graduated from college I remember wanting to teach AP English to really intelligent students at a big high school much like Southside. I wanted to save the world and become National Board Certified as soon as possible. I wanted to continue winning all of the awards and maintaining my flawless resume...And now, I can't even get myself to look at the National Board website much less actually decide to undertake a program specifically designed to identify the best teachers in America. I don't think I care if I'm one of the best teachers in America. I don't think I care if I do a lot of the things I once thought were essential to life. I don't care how much money I make. I don't care how big my house is. I don't care what kind of clothes I wear. I just don't care. I'm okay with being status quo when it comes to areas of my life that I once envisioned very differently than they are today. I'm okay with working at a small school, teaching average kids, and coaching average athletes. I feel so detached from the constant competition that once was my life that sometimes it seems so weird to me that my life used to be the way it was. It's like when I graduated from college I took my life back to the store and asked to exchange it for something else.
So what does this all mean? Heck if I know. Maybe I've had some fundamental shift in the determination of worth in my life. Maybe it has something to do with my acceptance that it's the people in your life that mean the most. Or maybe it has something to do with some other cliche quote about life being about something other than always being the best. Or maybe it means that I used up all of the winner in me years ago. Maybe everyone only has so much energy to exert toward being good at stuff and mine is all gone. Maybe I am sentenced to a life of the perpetual has-been. Maybe I was never that exceptional in the first place.
Before everyone reads this and deducts that I hate my life and am completely dissatisfied with where I am, know that I am not in that situation at all. I'm perfectly happy with my life as it is today. I wouldn't change much of anything if given the opportunity. Maybe it has taken me 24 years to be confident enough with who I am to stop worrying about what everyone else thinks. Or maybe I just needed a really good guy and a couple of dogs to slow me down enough to take it all in for a minute. Maybe that's it...I'm just taking it all in. For a minute.
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