Find Your Balance

Today my family celebrated my oldest daughter's 16th birthday and this evening as family lingers long after the festivities to visit, play board games, and eat dinner, I began reflecting over the last 16 years we've been blessed with her.  I'm simply in awe of the gift God gave my husband and me all those years ago!  I'm proud of the young woman she is becoming!

It also makes me think back through all the years and time, places we've lived, things we've been through as a family, both personally and professionally.  I can clearly identify seasons in our lives that we've been through, both blessed and challenging.  

For the past 2 school years, I've personally been through much with working full time, being a Mommy (and sometimes Daddy with my husband's health issues), and full time student as I worked on my Master's degree, as well as serving with my husband as Lay Children's Pastors at our small church.  My degree not only belongs to me, but to my family and you can't convince me otherwise.  You see, if not for my family, for them picking up much slack from me at home, for my oldest not helping more and more, it would not have even been possible to have accomplished this.  Sure, I've had the Mommy guilt that I'm sure many have faced..."Why can't you play with me?, etc."  My previous role, while I didn't realize it at the time, took a lot out of me personally.  I take my work seriously and don't need others to motivate me or reward me (though those are nice), but this compelled me to say "Yes" too much.  A dear sweet mentor has told me for years that I needed to work on saying "No" and not take on so much, but it's just now that I'm learning to do this.  This school year, I've entered into a new season, where I'm trying to rediscover my balance.  Sure, I'm going to work to the best of my ability and still take things home as they are seasonal to my new role, but I'm finding it important to also spend quality, laughing till your sides hurt, watching old classic movies till late, playing all the board games in the house, kind of time with my family and friends.  Balance, in a word.  It's making choices and enjoying those choices.  I hope you have a chance to discover ways to find your balance.

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Find Your Passion, Your Creative Outlet

I've been doing some back to school shopping with my 3 girls and we all seem drawn to the shirts that have sayings on them like, "Don't let anyone dull your sparkle!", "Live your dream!", "Live out loud!", etc.  The patterns, colors, and textures are all so creative and colorful.  It's inspired me to create some things for my school's computer lab based on these shirts.

If you haven't found your personal passion, I challenge you to do so.  For many years, I baked as my stress reliever.  I know it may sound odd, but when faced with overwhelming times, baking allowed me to focus on that singular task and not my troubles, measuring the ingredients, getting everything just right.  It was a self-fulfilling task that afforded the opportunity to have success at that time and bring joy to those that ate my treats.  When my husband (who is VERY diabetic, 3 shots and 2 pills a day diabetic) started having severe life threatening health issues, the latest landing him in the hospital in December of 2014 for 15 days straight, my passions had to change.  That's not to say I don't bake still, but it's only on a very special occasion and maybe once every other month now.  It was at that time, that I dove head first into technology and used it as my "escape" from whatever was bugging me.  It's my creative outlet, my stress reliever, and fulfills me in the same manner that baking did when others can enjoy the fruits of the end products.  Here are some projects I've worked on this past summer that have benefited myself and my husband, who is also a teacher (2nd grade).  Feel free to use them if you want too.

I've seen others use their passions and creative outlets to benefit others in many ways as well.  What I do know is that in discovering and embracing your passions, your creative outlet, that you will change your life for the better.  You will have a task or place to go when times get tough, and they will at some point, but it will allow you a constructive outlet.  Hopefully you can bring your passions into your class and be a teacher who no longer survives, but thrives, who brings creativity to their own students, and inspires them in their learning as a byproduct of just living your passion out loud.

Be Nice!

There's a reason I never really enjoyed watching the early episodes of American Idol every year, because I don't enjoy watching others be embarrassed on purpose or disrespected in such a public way (or private for that matter).

Today, I was embarrassed to be in my own profession of education by watching this happen.  We all know that at this time of the year, staff development is taking place during that week before school starts.  Every topic, session, etc is intentional, by design, has a purpose.  The purpose and rationale may not be clearly stated or communicated well, but I promise, experiencing both sides of education, from the teacher's point of view, and from an administrator's point of view, there's a vision to the information presented.  There's always a reason behind the information shared.  Perhaps, for privacy reasons or other reasons, the rationale can't be shared, but from the limited admin knowledge I have, I know that Everything is on Purpose.

And I will stop right here and just put my two cents in, that if you don't understand the vision of your administrators or school, it's your responsibility to ask, to find out.  If an administrator can't articulate that vision in a manner that others can understand, it can't be fulfilled, and if there's no vision at all, well, without vision, the people perish.

Today, I witnessed a presentation where there was confusion on the participants end, perhaps some misunderstanding, and instead of someone asking questions, they chose to be unkind to the presenter.  Are we not in the business of walking our talk?  Do we not ask our students to be respectful, kind to others?  I happened to be sitting by the person that said these unkind things and I know the presenter heard the words from the "peanut gallery".  Though I didn't see the presenters face, there was an audible pause in the room, a gasp even.  It was that moment when Simon Cowell tells someone something earth shattering and you just have to stand by and watch.  I truly felt for the presenter and she did a fantastic job of shrugging it off, not responding, but I'm sure that it will stick with them as a bad impression.

You know, we so often teach our kids to be kind, that yes words do hurt, like taking a piece of paper and crumbling it up and then trying to smooth it back out again.  Those wrinkles are still in the paper and will always be there.  We may be able to overlook them at some point, but they are still there.

So, to you, when presented with something that you don't understand, when the why isn't clearly stated, choose to BE KIND anyways.  That presenter is doing what was asked of them, what they have been tasked with from someone with more information than us, who understands that this is important.

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Change, Change, and More Change

For me and I'm sure many others, this is a season of change.  There's a old saying, "Work hard, play hard."  I never really knew what that meant until this summer.  For the last 17 years, I've been teaching during the school year AND summer months (except 1 summer to be Mommy to my middle one who made her entrance in late May).  However, this summer, after doing this for so long, and adding college work for the last couple of years, my husband insisted that I not teach summer school.  I didn't apply, didn't worry about it, but somehow still got roped into 12 days of Kindergarten SS, which I wrote about in some earlier posts.  

I really enjoyed having so many days to do N-O-T-H-I-N-G!  No schedules, no assignments or projects due, no one except my family needing me and even some days when they didn't need me, made for a wonderful summer!  My time belonged to me and I got to pick what was worth my time.  I read books for fun (not because I had to), learned a T-O-N about Google, played with Canva, along with sleeping in many days!  We found a list of top 10 watering holes in TX and started visiting.  Made our way to Barton Springs in Austin, and Blue Hole in Wimberly, TX this summer, along with our annual trip to Schlitterbahn in New Braunfels, TX! 

I finally discovered with the "play hard" part of that old saying meant.  Working hard is just second nature.  That comes from the legacy passed down from my Mom that I wrote about earlier.  We all need a season of resting, playing, having fun.  For me, that begins and ends with my family!

Additionally, I have entered this new role that my Principal calls the 3 T's.  This year I am serving my campus as Testing Coordinator, Title I, and Technology Teacher.  Technology is my personal passion (and there's a story there for another time).  Title I is something I've done for 4 years now, but never budgets, and Testing Coordinator is only just something I would say I dabbled in over the last 4 years.  Each role carries an element of nervousness because I'm dealing with kids and their individual needs, which STAAR, TELPAS, etc relies on and I have to get right from the get go, so it's routine for them, and dealing with budgets, which anytime I'm dealing with someone else's finances, I get very OCD and nervous about because I don't want to royally mess it up.  This new role is a "Never Been Done Before" role.  Folks at my campus ask me how I like it, and I don't really have a response yet, but I plan to enjoy all that comes with it, learn from it, and make the most of the opportunities I've been afforded.  My former Principal told me that if you aren't a little nervous, then you won't be great in your role, because it's in that nervousness that you pay attention to details, invest more to the role, etc and I have to say she's dead on with this.

Personally, my season of change came in my own family.  My oldest began dual credit classes for college and high school this summer, and today I enrolled our youngest in Kindergarten at my school.  We will have one in elementary, one in junior high, and one in high school this year.  It's a season of shuffling schedules, kids, and everything that comes along with new school years, new teachers, new starts.

My advice for anyone going through lots of change right now, would be to dive in, embrace the change!  It may not be your cup of tea, your favorite anything, but I guarantee you'll learn something from it and you might just be happily surprised by the outcomes and results. 

Can I be honest for a minute?

I just need to be honest for a minute...Will you let me?

1. I am a curious, questioning, black and white kind of person.  What you see is what you get with me.
I have this questioning side that bothers many people, mainly because I just tend to spit things out when they come to me.  Sometimes, ok many times, my filter doesn't kick in till too late.  My questioning side makes others feel like I'm challenging their authority, when in reality, it's just that I'm trying to understand the decision, understand the process, just plain ole' understand.  I also am a very black and white kind of person.  There's a right, ethical, judicious, safe for all way of doing things, and there's the opposite.  This is why it took so long for me to really take to Twitter and blogging.  My thinking was that of "You guys go ahead and I'll just let you get fired or in trouble, while I stand here and keep my job."

2. I think what you do says way more that what you say.
I am a people watcher by nature, just ask my husband as I point people's outfits to him, then hit his arm for looking.  I watch what you do, how you treat others, to decide if I should trust you or not.  I also watch if what you say you will do, you actually do.  I live by the old saying, "Burn me once, shame on you, burn me twice, shame on me."  Whether this is a saying to hold dear or not, that's up to you.  For me, it just is what it is.

3. I think where you send your children to school says a lot about who you trust and what you hold valuable.
All of my kiddos have gone through elementary (my last starts Kinder this year with me) where I have worked, going on 13 years now.  I trust the staff at my school to be the best teacher for them, and when my children show up in their class year after year, I know that they know that I'm trusting them to their education.  Other staff may send their child to the school they are zoned to for a variety of reasons, but I choose to send mine to my 80% ED, mostly Hispanic/African-American/LEP school, where they are the minority white, not at-risk kids.  I want them to be exposed to different cultures, different things.  I want them to know that they are blessed, that they need to stick up for others, that they need to help others.  I want them to know the value of working hard, not having everything handed to them.

4. I have a narrow mind sometimes, but I'm working on that.  I think others do too.
I have heard numerous education professionals from a variety of places say, "Why would a teacher continue to come to work at this school, this district, with "these" kids, if it was always so hard, so critical, so (fill in the blank) for them?  They should stop teaching and find another (happier) profession for themselves."  And on this, I usually just stay quiet.  But my thought is this, maybe that teacher who is unhappy, critical, whatever the negative adjective may be in your mind, is just STUCK, and feels like there's no way out of being stuck.  You see, I can say this, because there was a few years in my educational career where I felt stuck.  We never know the baggage a staff member brings with them to school each day.  In my going on 17 years in education, my husband has been hospitalized no less than 5 times and has been unemployed for nearly 8 of those years, on and off, for a variety of reasons.  You see, I felt stuck, because I wasn't in the grade level that was my passion or in a place I felt valued or in a friendly place.  I was the breadwinner for my family of 5, and couldn't just stop teaching, stop working.  I also felt stuck because I never felt like I was qualified for anything else, other than teaching, since my degree itself was in Elementary Education.  Am I still stuck?  No, but I have days where it creeps in, when I'm feeling overwhelmed, etc, but in my world, older = wiser, so I've learned to cope with this and find ways to overcome this personally.  I have challenged myself (in an earlier blog post) to take time to listen.  In listening to staff, we help them realize their potential, help them realize that they are not alone, that there are ways of becoming unstuck.  For me, it's in learning, in education.  Like my Twitter header says, "I seriously love learning." and I find that the more I learn, the more I need to learn and in doing so, I open more doors for myself, I become more confident in my skill set, in myself period.  How can you help someone today?

5. I recently got to hear from a speaker that's message was about "Leaving a Legacy" and it got me thinking, what am I leaving?
No one wants to ever think of themselves leaving this place, but part of his message was to do less "I" talk.  A lot ironic, since this whole blog post is filled with "I" things, but it makes me wonder what I'm leaving for my kids, for my family.  I watched my parents go through a divorce as a young child.  I watched my Mom work 2 and 3 jobs to make ends meet.  I was the first to attend college, still the only one to this day, and finish without financial help from family.  I want better for my kids, so that's why I work hard like my Mom to show them the value of hard work, helping others, overcoming failures, achieving success gracefully, and on and on.  All of these things I learned from my Mom and Dad and from many other folks who have had a tremendous impact in my life even as I entered teaching.  What impact will you make on others this year?  I hope it's a legacy type of impact.  I hope it's one you would follow after yourself.  That's what I'm working on.

Thanks for letting me be honest for a minute.