but I "have to..."

One of my biggest challenges as an educator and student is my need to overcome the "have to's."

I've successfully worked through "failing them guilt," and stepped into a realm where students earn whatever the heck they earn. I've gotten over being shocked when students don't like me. This has been exacerbated by students doing things like walking into my lecture 2 hours late and telling me to start over because I'm "going too fast" and am a "horrible teacher." I don't feel the slightest degree of guilt in refusing, not being pushed around, and telling the student to catch up on their own time or get out, because everybody else is where they need to be. Your grade is not equivalent to my problem.

I've gotten over people dropping my course. Yeah, I'll admit it, it crushed me first term. But again, time has proven that most of the time if a student drops you don't really want them in your class anyway. You could help them--sure--if you had infinite time and resources. You can imagine these wonderful teaching scenes straight out of made for TV movies where you sit down and they GET it and you magically cure their problems at home too. But 99% of the time that doesn't happen, and you just have a headache at the end of the day.

So, given this, what I really have to work on is my feeling of "having to" do something, that I don't really "have to" do. I've got to determine for myself what's important and what isn't and stop trying to be Super Teacher all the time (it's no little wonder that the letters emblazoned on Super Teacher's chest would be an ST) and just start trying to be whatever the heck it is that comes under that...

Case in point, finding out that I might be able to get webspace to host a website again. I lost my access to 1 and 1 and my website there months ago. I'd love to have webspace again...

But my mind tells me "You must redesign your webpage now! Make it better! Oh, and update your CV that you haven't touched in a year or more!"

Which, if I'm totally honest, is the last thing I need to work on right now. I have to read for Thursday (and Monday, but that seems far in the future right now). I have to move into my office, and pick out what random assorted office crap is going with me. I have to figure out when in the hell I'm going to have time to eat on Thursday--but I am *not* going to have time to update my CV by then.

As for the website, I could work on it, I guess, but not this week. It's not going to be CSS--that's for sure--because I lack a PC at home to test it on thoroughly (btw, Windows Vista sucks, please spare yourself the cash when it comes out). My Mac is very very slow, I'm running software on it that I probably shouldn't be--overtaxed processors are never much fun--and the latest version of Dreamweaver is SO slow on it that I can literally run nothing else (nevermind that Photoshop and Dreamweaver won't even open on the PC, because Vista swallows so much memory...)

Nope nope, I don't have the time, energy, or computing power to give over to making a brand spanking new webpage right now.

But I feel like I "have to."