Day #29

The conversation probably occurred fifteen years ago.
And yet I remember it like it was yesterday.
I had just finished a workshop for first grade teachers.
Eight hours.
Required for all of the first grade teachers in our district.
Forty some odd people crammed into a room
that comfortably held 25.
Some people that wanted to be there.
Some that really didn't.
Grueling.
My friend, Deb, who was going to be giving the same workshop later that week,
had come to watch.
We were looking through the evaluations.
Most of them were great.
People had enjoyed the workshop.
Had learned things that they thought would positively impact their teaching.
Felt the workshop was well organized and well presented.
There was one evaluation, however, that was awful.
The teacher had not thought it was a worthwhile experience.
Hadn't learned anything she could take back to her classroom.
Didn't think I had done a good job presenting.
I looked at that evaluation for a long time.
Probably three or four minutes.
And then Deb took it out of my hands.
"Why are you looking at that?" she asked.
"If 98% of the people said that the workshop was great,
why are you spending time looking at the bad one?
You know what I do with those?"
And she took the evaluation from my hands,
tore it into little pieces,
and threw it into the trash.
When I protested, Deb said, "Carol, if you had a bunch of those,
we would need to look at them.
We would need to figure out what to do differently.
But you didn't.
You had one.
Almost 40 people thought you did a great job.
We need to listen to those people."

I feeling that same way tonight.
The past three or four years I have sliced
every single day
during the month of March.
And I've felt really, really great
the last day of the month.
I'm not feeling the sense of jubilation this year.
I didn't make it all 31 days this year.
I skipped a couple of days in the middle of the month.
I wrote 29/31 times.
That's actually not bad.
I sliced about 95% of the time
And I commented on other people's slices,
at least ten every day.

I really did have a pretty good reason
for not writing that weekend that I missed two slices.
There was some pretty major stuff going on with the boys.
And for those days, I didn't have a working computer
and would have had to go to Kinko's to slice.
I started again as soon as I could.
I could have just quit for the month.
and I didn't do that.
I considered doing a couple of makeup slices
but it seemed kind of pointless
I simply. didn't write every day.

Tonight I'm not feeling the sense of jubilation
I usually do at the end of the March.
Instead, I'm feeling like a big fat failure.
I didn't slice every day this month.