Thinking About Learning

I love new experiences! Over the weekend I participated in a walking half marathon at Myrtle Beach. Before my friend, Valerie, talked me into doing this with her, I didn’t even know there was such an event. I love to hike and walk, but in the past several years 4 or 5 miles was the most I had done in one stretch. Val and I trained together by walking about 45 minutes 3 times a week. That was some serious training, huh? We had big intentions, but between schedules, after-school meetings, and illnesses, we never got quite as in-depth with our training as we had planned. Even still, steady and persistent, we successfully completed the half marathon in 3 hours and 39 minutes. Our knees and hip joints were aching, but we were quite proud of ourselves!

Being a lover of metaphor, I couldn’t resist this one. Sometimes we have the greatest intentions at school to plan and create ideal lessons, but there are always things that get in the way: meetings, phone calls with parents, behavior issues, paperwork, more meetings. When we find ourselves overwhelmed, we have to just make the best of the circumstances at hand. High expectations are necessary, but beating ourselves up over unmet expectations is very counter-productive. Often we must simply just take our best shot and do the best we can within the circumstances that surround us. Determination can carry us a long way as we seek to give our best to our students.

Curriculum Connections:
Literacy: Poetry links; study poetry and poets; write poetry; podcast student poems, post them on blogs, or make digital poetry books.