Learning to Grow Every Day

"If you have the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind" Doing a random act of kindness for someone is a noble, selfless, and admirable thing to do.  To do something nice for someone or have someone do something nice for you, with no strings attached, brings a good feeling.  I wish I did it more often.  It is a feeling of shelling out love and being loved.  We have a family that allows us to say with them Columbus when we are not staying with my parents.  When we first met them we were embarrassed by the way they showered us with dinner, tickets to football games, free babysitting for our children, you name it they wanted to do it for us.  The sooner we realized that they really wanted nothing in return and they just loved our company and wanted us to be comfortable, it became easier to accept.  We still want to pay them back in some way, but not because we feel obligated, but because we truly appreciate them.  What this family ...

How many of you wake up every day and think about what your strengths are?   Not a single hand went up when I asked this question during class yesterday.  Full disclosure, my hand would have remained down as well.  The assignment began with me asking the students what their strengths were, not just academically but in general.  This proved to be a difficult task for some, and when the students asked me to disclose my strengths, I then began to empathize with the difficulty of the assignment.   Why is it so difficult to identify and discuss our strengths?  Maybe it is because we are too busy worrying about everything that could go wrong in our day, the stresses we have, our comparisons to others, or maybe it just seems too vain to point out the great things about ourselves.  Although the lesson began slowly, students began to think outside the box and feel good about the strengths they were writing down on paper.  Then came the sharing, and ...

One of the really great benefits of being a teacher is having the ability to have the summer off to grow professionally, spend time with family, and to relax and recharge for the following school year.  While I absolutely love my job as an educator at Lawrence school, it is necessary to have that time to reflect, play, and grow personally and professionally.  This past summer was filled with opportunities to do just that.   Let’s start at the beginning.  Our first order of business was to take a trip across the country to Colorado to visit friends and then on to Phoenix, Arizona to visit family.  If you have ever traveled with very young children on an airplane, you can empathize with the challenges of packing, escorting, and most importantly feeding everyone along the way.  A hungry 3-year-old is a hangry 3-year-old.  I think some adults can relate as well.  Once we got past the logistics of traveling, we were off on a great advent...