Lists. Goals. Ugh.

I love to make lists.

It is three in the morning and I have just rearranged my blog. I have been attending to neglected responsibilities since my formal work at school ended two weeks ago: visiting my elderly, feisty mother in North Carolina, registering my scandalously long unregistered car, and having a routine medical procedure that shall go unnamed and kept me up all night so that I napped this afternoon and can't sleep now.

It's satisfying to have a list of goals that you can really, fully accomplish. You might not make your mother completely happy while you're there, but you can get to Winston-Salem and back; you can eventually leave the Registry of Motor Vehicles with Massachusetts license plates; you can emerge from the medical center with a piece of paper that says you got that screening you were supposed to get.

Unlike the list of goals I made at the beginning of the school year: to return papers more quickly; not to lose my temper; to be on time for class. The problem with those goals are that they aren't one time things. I have to achieve them over and over again. I'm bound to slip up. Failure is inevitable.

And then there are the goals that depend on other people. The vague goal to teach someone. Really? How do I ever cross that one off the list? " Teach my students." I'm counting on my memory working; I'm counting on developing a good rapport with a variety of kids; I'm counting on their brains working (their ability to read, to listen, to remember); I'm counting on them doing their homework; I'm counting on them listening.

Finally there are the two goals that cancel each other out: Care deeply. And -- Don't care so much. The thing that makes me a good teacher, when I am a good teacher, is the thing that makes me unhappy as a teacher. I invest a lot -- for whatever reasons, not all of them noble. I get frustrated when my students aren't invested or when others (students, parents, administrators, the world) don't appreciate my investment. Frustrated, unhappy teachers are not usually effective. But I don't know how to do a really good job without caring, and I don't know how to care without taking things personally. It's a pretty personal world.

"Live with contradictions" might need to be on the list. And it might never get crossed off.