...its own reward.

I spent a considerable amount of my President's holiday doing work for school.  I did manage to stay away from my classroom - but I basically just substituted that with my mancave at home (all the same distractions, and walking distance to a food source).  Doing work on down time is basically a way of avoiding that feeling I get when I know I've wasted a significant amount of time doing nothing.  That feeling is intensified if I managed to bring not one, but several projects home - only to leave them untouched in the corner of the mancave.  Really, it's amazing how bored one can get while ignoring a mountain of work in favor of staying in bed playing Candy Crush.

Well, mission accomplished.  And while I can't complain that I didn't do anything - I still have the feeling that I didn't do enough.  In my mind, I'm gauging the number of projects I finished vs. the number of promises I made.  Given how much work I did put in... I'm trying to tell that voice to shut up. One of my problems is that when I have extra time to do something, I start getting meticulous.  Projects that I would normally pound out in an hour or two get stretched into a day and a half, because I can't find the right font, or something about the formatting bugs me.  I also get caught up in side projects - like trying to find some bit of freeware that lets me do a very specific task that will only *slightly* decrease my overall work time (of course, this is negated by the time it took to set it up).  Despite that kind of thing slowing me down, the results are pretty awesome, and I'm usually pretty proud of what I come up with.

While every project I finish gets stored in the vault as something that I'll be able to use forever, I am starting to come to terms with the reality that I won't be teaching forever.  In fact, it freaks me out a little that I probably have fewer years left in my career than I've already put in.  So at what point does the work that I'm doing become not worth the effort, given that I'm unlikely to use some of this stuff more than once or twice?  Moreover, what do I do with it once I'm retired?  I imagine I'll find some young fresh-out-of-college music teacher, hand them a hard drive with a wink and say "Pay it forward, kid"

The only thing is... what I'm benefiting most from is not the final product, but the process of doing it.  Sure, I can hand over all my stuff, but would I really just delay the process of a young teacher kicking themselves into gear?  I had plenty of material to steal from - teachers have a way of giving their stuff away.  I still preferred my own crude self-made tools, flawed as they were.  It was the only way I was going to learn.  Or.... maybe I was just stubbornly re-inventing the wheel.

Regardless, I'm probably going to continue doing what I do until I retire, and maybe even beyond that.  I watched my dad retire into a nearly inert pile of flesh in front of the TV - I promised myself I would try to have something planned - like being a 'consulting music teacher',  a volunteer woodwind coach, or someone to pound out transcriptions or special arrangements on Finale. Certainly, I'll keep giving private lessons.  In any case, whatever it is will probably keep me alive for a few years longer.  Hard work is, after all....