Looking backward as the countdown continues...

Today I finally finish my Summative portfolio. It's basically a folder that you put stuff in from the past year with your logs of parental contacts, extra-curricular activities, and staff development things you've attended throughout the year. I pulled out an old accordion folder from my bookshelf this morning to compile everything in. When I looked inside it, I found tons of old papers from my first year of teaching. Looking through the names of the students and teachers, I realized that I remembered next to no one. Maybe it's because I was only at the school one year. Maybe it's because I only saw the kids once or twice a week. Whatever the reason, it made me sad. I feel like the last four years of my life are gone forever. I haven't really accomplished much, and while I've improved vastly as a teacher in terms of lesson planning and classroom management, I'm pretty much in the same place personally and in a heck of a lot more debt. One of the biggest reasons I'm glad to be moving to Korea is to force myself to grow a little bit. I want to look back at my twenties as a time where I further refined myself as a person, and I'm quite sure that if I stayed in the United States and continued to teach music, that growth would not occur.