Spring and Ideas: Birth and Creation




Well, Week 24.

I read this essay again this morning, with new eyes. Eyes after the Parkland shootings, which occurred 20 miles from where my sister and brother-in-law live. Where soccer teammates of my great-niece go to school.

I’m going to post the entire essay from Dear Teachers here today for everyone, because I think it fits today. Please share it if you wish! I wanted this piece to be a confession about, and reminder against, giving up. I look at the drive of students like Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg and am inspired. Reminded. Feeling validated in what I’ve been pushing hard the last 18 months: we’re stronger together. Being together helps keep those "half-shaped blobs" of solutions and change alive.

We each have circles of influence. Let’s use them. Let’s not slack off. I’m talking to teachers right now- preaching to the choir a bit. Perhaps, simply be less silent? Share your reality with some people (young and old) you normally wouldn’t. Not in negative ways. Just in honest ways. It can be daunting, but, we need it. You need it. Our youth need it. There are beautiful eggs out there that need warmth.

February- Week 24- Birth and Creation

Ideas hatch.

In spring, we have the best opportunity to remind ourselves of this fact. Life is being born everywhere we turn as nature joyfully celebrates the end of want and burgeoning abundance.

Being human, we have the luxury of not having to wait until spring to give birth to new and wonderful things. Look at all that our students have created and achieved since Day 1 and where we have come since our first day on the job. New ideas, hopes, dreams and aspirations can arise anywhere and at any time.

The downside is, we may very easily leave things in an incomplete stage. What’s the impetus for us to take those half-shaped blobs in our heads, hearts, workbenches or hard drives and turn them into something whole? There’s the real chance of it sliding to “It’ll never…”

Eggs need to be both laid and nested upon to hatch. We must remind ourselves to keep going after those first pieces come together.

Make a commitment. Write it down. Dream a dream and then figure out a way to make it happen. Day by day and bit by bit we can get places. If we share our ideas with people and open ourselves to honest review, we can get closer to the fulfillment of our ambitions. Our students will be inspired to follow our lead if they see us taking these more difficult steps.

Who knows what brilliance we might then hatch?

My ideas to hatch: ................................................................................

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The End

Image
I’m going to roll the last two essays of Dear Teachers into one reflection and close this first year’s journey off. It’s the end. Or, an end. In Week 39, I wrote of the importance in seeing those tiny good things in life: life’s sweetnesses. Ends make them stand out more. There has been a ton of vitriol on social media this week. Perhaps not new, but the education community has been sucked into this phenomenon as well. Earnest people have been burned. Stances have been challenged. Flames have been fanned. You know the whole routine. Between these behaviors and my own personal struggles, I’ve been in an odd place wondering about what we (I) are doing. Then, I had a short, but surprisingly deep conversation with a clerk at a store. It really moved me. I found myself genuinely thanking him and wishing him well as we finished our business. I honestly felt a tiny moment of sweetness there that captured that wholeness and togetherness of which I’ve spoken of throughout this book
Read more

Rising Higher and Higher

Image
This week, I’m including the full essay from my book, Dear Teachers . In addition, I’m going to share a link to a beautifully written blog entry from a teacher I’ve met on Twitter, which I believe resonates with it. It’s Julia E. Torres’s An Open Heart , which talks of the need of being both true and there for all our students. The picture I used this week wasn’t the normal nature scenes. It’s a balloon, whose pattern reminded me of rainbows and seagulls, flapping across the sky. The word choices I made were influenced by BTS’s  Outro: Wings , a powerful song about hope, belief, and  the need to support each other. All my April essays focus on really seeing what is . Especially now, we may be too exhausted to see either our or our students’ progress. We may be disheartened by personal or larger-scale setbacks and feel swamped by negativity. But if we find time to look, we’ll see our balloons are still rising and we can make changes to help them rise further. There’s hop
Read more

Falling Back: A Gift

Image
I participated in a Twitter chat this morning which revolved around the time change we just underwent. Folks on #Peopleskills gave some great responses to questions about what falling back means, the difference between falling back and learning from our past, and how falling back can be a good thing or a destructive thing and why. It segues well into Week 9 of Dear Teachers . Marlene’s picture is a bleak and craggy one, in my opinion. There’s a patch of green, but for the most part, the scene is bare with terrain that looks extremely difficult to traverse. I imagined trying to cross that stream and saw myself slipping on the rough cobble which is tumbled everywhere. Sometimes, we have to fall back. Allowing it to happen can be a gift: to adjust our plans to match the true situation we find ourselves in and to achieve genuine success. As Tom Reid @_TomGReid posted, “The earlier a space probe makes a trajectory adjustment, the less fuel (easier) it is. Unless you period
Read more