Day 6 - Guilt

Day 2 out sick and oh, the guilt.

I really feel I am wronging my students by being absent today. Maybe I'm sharing too much here, but when the symptoms kick back up, I feel a little happier. If I'm in pain, at least I'm paying for my laziness.

Now that's not healthy.

How did I get to this point? When I was in steel sales (my job before this one), I could hit the couch with no guilt at all. I knew I'd have extra work when I got back, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. If my Frito Lay parts were late, well that was one fewer corn chip packaging machine clogging the arteries of our nation.

Maybe it's an artifact of being in nurturers, but many educators have an enormous capacity for guilt. The level of guilt that if harnessed into an energy source could power a small city. Actually, it is currently harnessed to power our school district.

I'm not saying that district officials have some specific master plan to turn our guilt into cost savings, but there are people taking advantage of it. They don't do much - a few comments like "it's for the kids", "well, I guess we'll have to cancel it then", "salaried professionals in other fields do committee work for free", or "but you didn't go into teaching for the money" and we're martyring ourselves all over the place.

Maybe my first step in standing up to this guilt is to go back upstairs and lay down.