Summer Detour and the Detour Bag

At the start of the summer holidays, I wrote about a detour. I wrote about my purposeful move away from thinking about teaching all summer long, something I had done for years. I love teaching, and I love learning about learning, and I love reading about new research, and it’s easy to get caught up in spending summers in an altered working mindset. This summer, I detoured off that path and, as tomorrow I start back to work full-time prepping for students next week, I thought a little reflection would bring closure to my summer.

The detour was a bit of a bumpy ride to begin with, but I was determined to shift my mindset so that being a teacher would fade into the background. I admit it didn’t fade easily. I had to push it aside for awhile. In retrospect, it was wonderful to focus on nothing directly work related and instead put all my energy into everything else in my life. The struggle for balance was blissfully absent once I’d pushed aside the temptation to stay in the teacher mindset all summer.

I did all the things I listed in my original post. The boys and I read, biked, swam, and made things. We watched movies together, made cardboard box forts in the living room and spent time being bored.  We traveled through this beautiful province to visit family and friends. We spent rare, special time with the oldest of my nephews. We laughed, fought, goofed around, teased each other and tested one another’s patience. We grew closer. I hope everyone had a chance to do that – my students, my friends, my colleagues near and far. It’s that relationship piece that people always talk about working on in their classrooms. I hope we all remember to work on it at home, too.

The best part? I was able to focus on being a mom. I let my two energetic, growing boys have all my attention. I used to think that working full-time made me a better mother. I used to think that I’d be bored being a stay-at-home mom with kids. I wondered this summer how I could have ever thought that at all. What was I thinking? Was I delusional? Young and foolish? Trying to convince myself that working was better for me and the kids? I love staying home with my boys. It’s precious time that could not be better spent.

I did do one thing on my own. Because I like a challenge, and love to create, and knew that I’d need something interesting and novel to grab my attention and focus on this summer, I made a knitted, felted bag. This may not seem like anything interesting or special to you, but to me, through the summer, as I carefully interlocked yarn stitch by stitch, it became a symbol of my detour. It was the one goal that I set out to achieve this summer, not to read the latest ed leadership book or finish my Masters degree, but to simply finish a bag.

I think I learned a lot more from the process of knitting that piece than I ever thought I would. First off, it was much more difficult than anything I’d ever knitted before. I had to jump in, just do it, take the risk. Also, I made some mistakes and had to figure out how to fix them, or, in a couple of cases, learn to live with them because I couldn’t figure out how to fix them. I had to persevere when it started to get boring. I had to pay attention so that I wouldn’t miss a stitch. Tonight, to finish the project, I went through the process of felting – another thing I’d never done before and one of those things that you realize you have no control over, you just have to do it carefully and hope it all works the way you wanted it to. Many teaching and learning metaphors can be found in the process if you look just a little bit closer than most would.

So, in the end, with work tomorrow, all I really have to show for my summer is a bag. A little, knitted bag, that’s a bit crooked, and according to my older son, looks like a hat upside-down. I call it my detour bag.

It was only a little project, but not so little of an accomplishment. To me, it symbolizes a summer where, day by day, as with stitch by stitch, I slowly bound my family closer and closer together. A little project which gave me the reminder that I was detouring from work to focus on family, and symbolized my priority on having a closely knit family at the center of it all.

 

2 thoughts on “Summer Detour and the Detour Bag

  1. Re: The Detour Bag
    I can’t believe you “jumped in” and just started knitting. No planning! No prep! No schedule! Ta-da You are a risk taker!
    The life metaphor you discovered is awesome. I’m so glad you discovered more of your family on your detour. Teachers really need to take summer detours.

  2. Hi Jo!
    I knew at the start of the summer that I needed to jump in to something that was a sufficient challenge so I didn’t work all summer, something to remind me that I was on summer holidays and downtime and family was my number one priority. I didn’t expect to find a metaphor, but in the end, I learned much, much more knitting that delightful little bag than I would have if I’d read educational non-fiction all summer long. And yes, discovering more of my family was fantastic. Best summer of doing ‘nothing’ I’ve ever had!

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