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This week: Påskeferie (Easter Break)!

• Sunday, 29 March headed into Oslo to celebrate my birthday with a Rover friend! Went to church for Palm Sunday, then brunch, a bookstore, a walk in a sculpture garden, sushi, and sauna!
• Monday, 30 March my birthday! Birthday celebration day 2: went to the Nobel Peace Center and high tea service. Headed back to Halden.
• Tuesday, 31 March ran errands around Halden in preparation for flying Stateside on Wednesday. Packed.
• Wednesday, 01 April flew to Denver! Train from Halden to the Oslo airport. Layover in Reykjavík. Arrived home!
• Thursday, 02 April participated in an MFA defense, for which I was a committee member
• Will be Stateside until Monday, 13 April. 

I’ve been taking stock this week. I celebrated a milestone birthday (in Norway!) and I’m home in the States for 13 days on Norway’s Easter Break. I have approximately 10 weeks left on my Fulbright Rover contract. When I flew Stateside I brought back with me one of four of my giant suitcases, packed to the limit (23 kg/50 lbs) with winter clothing, a couple pairs of boots, and things I could bring back at this point in the school year. 

Things are starting to wind down in my time in Norway, and being back Stateside brought into relief that I’ll be back permanently in just a few months. Throughout the year I’ve been thinking about how my life and how I will be different once I come back. I don’t want to live like Norway never happened. So what would it look like to live that? I’ve been getting to do a test run this week. 

Care for self and others. This is one of the most prominent things that’s been on my mind all year. In Norway, I live by myself and only have to think about taking care of myself. In the States, I live with my partner, dog, and cat. We’re planning on getting a new puppy this summer! My parents and brother are often in town. When I get back to the States this summer my mother-in-law will be living about 10 minutes away by car, having moved from Michigan. I’ve written before on this blog how I like taking care of others, but sometimes my care of others supersedes care for myself. I’m not really sure how to simultaneously care for myself and how to care for others actually. It’s a challenge! Back in the States, I don’t care enough for myself. In Norway, I don’t have any choice but to care for myself. I keep asking myself, what would it look like to care for myself once I get back to Colorado? Would that entail more rest? Keeping my good eating and exercise habits I’ve developed in Norway? Saying no to overcommitting myself? I don’t think I can fully answer this question until I get back. But in the meantime I can practice noticing when my body feels overworked. I can notice my rest and recovery methods when I’m feeling overstretched. I can develop strategies and guidelines for what to prioritize and how to use my time once home. I can practice giving myself grace when I need time to adjust to the balance of care.

One key way I have cared for myself in Norway is by building my running routine. As I’ve written before in this space and as the Nike Running Club app Coach reminds us, when we’re not running, we’re recovering. Recovery involves rest, hydration, and fuel. Part of why I love running is because it also motivates me to take care of myself in preparation for running. So I have found that I can get a good amount of rest and can make adjustments on what kind of rest and how much of it after a big run day, teaching day, and/or long travel day. I have learned that not all activity requires the same kind of rest, and not all rest is the same. I didn’t make this distinction before Norway, and I’m learning how to pay attention to my body to give myself the kind of rest I need when I need it. 

A challenge for me in getting the kind of rest I need is that my work is different in the States. In Norway, my only responsibilities are teaching. I am not required by Fulbright to do research on my teaching, nor am I required by Fulbright to do any service work, both of which I am required to do in addition to teaching in the States. Don’t get me wrong—I love the rotation of teaching, research, and service I get to do in my job at Colorado State University. But it’s hella taxing. Part of why I feel rested in Norway is because I have time to rest. In Colorado, I am overworked. My friends who return from sabbatical have noted that it’s like a reset in that they don’t have to go back to doing all the things they did before they left. I want to be able to have this kind of reset too. 

Teaching. I have loved almost every second of teaching in Norway (when I didn’t love it it was because the students were mean to me, which was confusing). I have had the honor and privilege of working with learners in 4th grade through masters students, teachers, teachers-in-training, and fellow teacher educators at multiple universities in Norway. I have been lucky enough to observe two fellow Rovers teach students and three fellow Rovers teach teachers. I’ve been able to build custom workshops for secondary students and teachers and collaborate with colleagues to plan and facilitate workshops. In my unique teaching situation this year, I have been able to teach the same workshop dozens of times to different groups of learners, honing my skills in how to plan for and make real-time adjustments per the needs of learners. I have built my capacity to trust myself and my knowledge of teaching, of learners, and of the content. In the States, rather than working with different groups of students in the same or similar workshops, I work with a group of learners in each class to bring them through a semester of learning. So I get to plan a semester-long program of study rather than just a 45- or 90-minute period of learning. I get to know students because of the amount of time we spend together. I get to read their work and use that work to plan for learning. 

When I get back to the States, I want to trust myself and my teaching in the ways that I trust myself and my teaching in Norway. I feel like I have said this a number of times since 2003 when I started teaching, but I feel like perhaps in Norway I have learned how to do that since every time I walk into a school it is likely the first and only time I will be walking into it (there are a few exceptions). I don’t have to sustain a program of study in Norway, but because of that I have learned to ground and bound my teaching and use strategies that I think maximize student learning for the time that we have. I have a sense I can do a better job of trusting myself and my teaching upon my return Stateside and I’m looking forward to trying that out.

I have also realized how much I have missed and how important it is for me to be consistently working with secondary students. While I was a high school English teacher for 13 years, it’s been 10 years now since I left the high school classroom. Which means that my time as a high school teacher and time teaching teachers is almost even. I’ve written before about the anxiety I feel teaching teachers when I am so removed from that context. Working again with secondary students reminds me what they’re like and how I can build relationships with them that support their learning while moving them toward learning goals. Reconnecting with my experience teaching secondary students makes me a better teacher educator, as I continue to build some first-hand experience about what teaching secondary students is like. Granted, I am not the day-to-day teacher and there are some things I just don’t do: plan all the units and lessons, evaluate student work, but it’s good to work with secondary students again.

Research. Being in Norway and away from my regular colleagues has given me the opportunity to get out of the space where “publish or perish” reigns. I enjoy working at CSU, but I always feel like people around me are publishing way more than I am and writing at all hours of the day to publish and stressed out about writing and submitting and publishing. Don’t be fooled that I’m not worried—I am. But I don’t need to be always around other people who are worried and frantic and stressing me out. Being away has given me the chance to hear the voice in my own head rather than those from whom I feel pressure to submit and publish. And I’ve been able to have conversations with other researchers I wouldn’t normally have access to, just because we’re in different departments, about what kind of research I want to do and what I want to value in my work. It’s been really affirming to get out of my own silo and talk to others in different fields about what they do and how they do it. 

Knowing the difference between glass and rubber balls. I had a friend in graduate school who taught me the difference between rubber and glass balls: the former you can drop and they’ll just bounce right back at you. The latter you can drop and they’ll shatter. The key is knowing which responsibility is which kind of ball. I used to treat all responsibilities as glass balls and that is just an unsustainable way of life. In Norway, I have been learning that there are way more responsibilities that are rubber balls and I don’t have to drive myself to sleeplessness or overwork or overstress to meet others’ expectations. In Norway I have a Rover friend who always says, “it’s all good” and I have found myself saying this too, almost exclusively to myself, especially in moments which would have previously really stressed me out. I have discovered that it is super calming to just tell myself that everything is going to be okay, which it generally is.

Having hobbies. I have always wanted to have hobbies and in Norway I have lots of them. I read a lot, do puzzles, run, Netflix, go on long walks, explore new places, see shows, sauna. In the States, I read and run, but that’s pretty much it. I want to get into textiling and finish a couple quilts I have started since moving to Colorado. I think engaging in hobbies is a good way to rest and take care of myself. 

Exploring new places. I visit a lot of places in Norway that Norwegians tell me they’ve never been to. When I ask Norwegians why they’ve never been to these places, they say it’s because these places are always there. This happens too for me in the States. There are a few spots I want to get to in Colorado, but haven’t in the three years I’ve lived there because I figure I’ll always have the time to get there. But in Norway, I only have a year! Ten months, actually. There’s a lot of pressure to get to that town or do that thing now because I only have this one moment. I don’t need to be traveling all the time like I do in Norway, because that gets taxing, but I would like to take better advantage of the beautiful place I live in and explore it more rather than putting off that exploration. 

I’ll keep thinking about what I want to preserve when I get back Stateside, but for now it’s nice to be able to do a kind of test run.