Dear Teachers

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. Th...

Just because things are quiet, doesn’t mean all is well. Outwardly, we may project an image that says all is right in our world. Sometimes, we feel the need to do this as a way to get through difficult times. When it becomes our standard, we fall farther and farther away from our truth selves. Our family, friends and coworkers can think we’re fine, but there’s conflict roiling on the inside, threatening to tear us apart. We will break if we lose hope and a sense of controlling our fate. That will negatively affect us and all whose lives we touch. The Jane Austen quote I used this week speaks of a defiant quiet. The character, Fanny Price, sees and understands her reality and is not happy with the situation. That’s a different quiet. When we let go of the outside stuff, we can feel our centers. It’s just us. What is that? Who is that? Are our days filled with our passions or just filled? We can look at it all with a bit of objectivity. That’s the quiet depicted in...

We’re now in the last month of the year and onto a new focus! We’ve covered important ground so far. The importance of the people in our lives, both ourselves and all the coworkers, family, friends, students, parents and overall communities we live in. We’ve touched on the nature of struggles in our days: feelings of darkness, loneliness, and things that chill our bodies, minds and spirits. December is all about remembering life’s positive foundations. Week 14 is a reminder that things can be tough, but with hope things can change and faith that they will, we can thrive. Marlene captured the water droplets from melting ice falling and plopping into a running river. There’s a shelf of hard ice hanging on but one gets the sense that its time is limited: the flow and sun’s rays will soon see its demise. The water’s rippling surface reminds us that life is always moving. Everything’s dancing. If we can remember that and believe, we can see the sun again even if today it’s beh...