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Daniel snored, I like to think in my face because it makes it funnier, certainly to me it is ironic that he snores an hour before I need to get up anyways. And then the beast is in motion, my mind and all of the things I have on my plate to think about right now.

For years now I have believed that a key problem to my time and place comes from the shear busyness of our lives. The more I have to do, the more traffic I have to drive in, the less patience I have for my fellow human being or anything really. The balancing act in this place is in not doing too much and not caring too much about money. Less is more as far as how I feel internally about everything around me. If I have time I exercise, eat right, and drive much, much less. When I do go out in public then I know to have patience for traffic, for parking, for people who are not with it and slow, for the over population that is crushing down around my single person and being.

I look right now at the Orthodox people around me at work. They have many, many children. I am not sure how people pay for many, many children. I’ve not been sure how people pay for their lives in general. Some get help from parents and family, some are with very savvy people. If you are very savvy, were you moral to get ahead and have so much more than others? I wonder how rare that is.

How much running around do the moms and dads do if they have three, five, ten children? I dated once or twice an Orthodox man during my www.jewru?net days. He was from a family of ten siblings and was himself very dysfunctional, never got proper attention from his folks.

The Orthodox adults at my work with many children themselves allow and are much more lenient with children’s behaviors. Children can rip through hallways shouting and banging into adults, and those adults don’t see it. They have so many issues to choose from with so many children, they have drowned out the noise, and pick their battles. Behavior falls to the wayside, as I have seen with the children’s homework habits in my previous third grade classes.

Yet my middle school students mostly do their work. Some try to turn in half finished assignments, particularly the 7th grade math boys. When I think back on my own middle school years, I remember the almost complete lack of parental guidance in school, and I only had one sibling. Tutors were unheard of in my family. I lost my way in how to study, and nobody helped me fill in those valuable pieces. Eventually I had to learn it all myself in junior college, how to study. And as a teacher have learned so many valuable methods for doing so, and impart them on my students, and when I can their parents.

But back to busyness. I see December 17th and the end of my teacher’s geometry class on the horizon. I realize that I let those Rabbis give me a raw deal this year by having me teach 7 periods from 8 a.m. til 2:30 p.m. The nice part is I will have a year of middle school teaching experience in tandem with this math credential. Then this large bargaining chip, a math credential with experience, will be available for play.

I know if I stay at this school I will ask for $30 dollars a class next year, to teach just five classes, and for a conference period. I really was baited and switched when they told me I’d have to teach these two computer classes in order to do the others. I am teaching three middle school literature classes, from six different text books, don’t forget two math classes. It is a lot on this plate.Then to drive twice a week to my math class the hour in traffic to campus and home again. Still with a million pieces to think about for my classes, math homework, and just living in general. I am supposed to eat, cook, clean, walk dogs.

My husband is a fantastic help, and for now has been working a lot. He is naturally bright. One day of work for him as a dialogue editor is equivalent to a week on what I earn as a teacher. Yet his work will come and go through out the year. Mine is steady and busy, with a trickle at the tutoring center in the summer. If I were a different kind of person I would ride on his coattails. But I have always sought my own self sufficiency. The question is, how to balance getting ahead while not doing too much.