Being "Deeply Intertwined" with My Area of Expertise

What did you do on fall break?

I get the thing about work-life balance—I really do. I didn’t do any lesson planning or grading. I did do a lot of fun things. And some of the fun things I did involved reading and writing. Like writing this blog. One of the great things about being a teacher is getting to share with students the things that I love about my area, getting to induct them into the coolness of reading and writing. So, here are some of the cool things I did, including (but not limited to) reading and writing! 

• I ate fun food--like afternoon tea and really good Mexican food in downtown Kyoto.
• I went for long walks with my husband to enjoy the perfect fall weather here and breathe in the fall sights—the last of the rice harvest being brought in, brilliant orange persimmons dangling on bare branches against a blue sky, and flaming golden gingko trees. (While we walked, we also may have talked about another blog I'm working on, as well as some blogs he is working on.)
• I talked with family--my dad on Skype, my daughter on Facebook, and my grandkids on Readeo. (I also saw lots of grandkid pictures on Instagram!)
• I read my new issue of the School Library Journal and found a couple of new books for my to-read list.
• I got my 4th COVID vaccination (2nd booster) and spent the next day lying in bed reading. (Who doesn’t love an excuse for doing that! Worth the body aches and fatigue.)
• I watched a Nerdy Book Club podcast by Donalyn Miller and Colby Sharp about introducing books to kids and found a couple of new books for my to-read list. 
• I browsed an English bookstore (a holiday treat here in Japan!) and came across the book So Far from the Bamboo Grove by Yoko Kawashima Watkins. It’s the author’s story of fleeing her home in northern Korea at the end of World War 2 as a young child with her mother and older sister, and returning as a refugee to her unknown homeland of Japan. Great to pair with When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park, historical fiction about a Korean family during the Japanese occupation, which is in my middle school curriculum.
• Besides that I also read…
• Living in Full View of the God of Grace by my friend Bruce Young, long time Japan missionaries, which came out November 1.
• Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom by Zoltan Dornyei in preparation for a department discussion next week.
• Trash by Andy Mulligan—a story that will open kids’ eyes to poverty and political corruption in the Philippines, but also give them a happy ending.
• Resistance by Jennifer Nielsen. I’ve recently discovered this great writer of middle grades European historical fiction, and I have a student who is also a fan. This story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is the best of the three I’ve read!
• Omar Rising by Aisha Saeed. I loved Amal Unbound, and this companion book about Amal’s friend, Omar, confronting his own injustice in their corner of Pakistan is another great, hope filled story.
• The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin. I read this classic a long time ago, and wanted to revisit it before passing it on to a student who was interested.

In In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine quote the administrator of one of their model schools: "…[T]he school’s best teachers are those whose areas of teaching expertise are deeply intertwined with their out-of-school identities….I want know what [job candidates] are doing on weekends. If they have tools in their hands on a weekend, that’s the engineering teacher I want. If they’re a working artist, that’s the art teacher I want. I don’t want somebody who’s just teaching it. I want someone who’s got to do it" (Location 1689). 

This is what it looks like for me. What does it look like for you to maintain a work-life balance and yet have an area "of teaching expertise...deeply intertwined with [your] out-of-school identit[y]"?