Tag Archives: excitement

Here we go

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The school year begins. 180 school days.

I am nervous about the balance of things: work/home life/exercise; leadership/management; priorities/budgets; teaching & learning; support & independence; planning & follow through; time & efficiency.

I may be nervous but I can feel the potential… the promise of a great year ahead. Physiologically there is almost no difference between anxious nervousness and excitement. So I’ll reframe my thinking, I am excited.

I hope all educators are equally excited. We are in an incredible occupation. We change lives. We make learning fun and engaging. And our teaching goes well beyond the curriculum. We don’t teach subjects, we teach kids. We teach kindness, collaboration, cooperation, and creativity. We don’t just teach classes, we teach young adults who want to do well, who soar, who struggle, and who do the best with the resources they have.

Some come to us full of support and resources, others come to us with much less. The less the resources, the more compassion we need. The greater the challenge, the more patience we must have. The more we are challenged, the higher we must rise.

We can be the purveyor of the status quo, or we can be the change agents we want to be. It all begins today… here we go!

— — —

I wrote the following in 2011:

My Open Educator Manifesto

‘We’ educate future citizens of the world

Teaching is my professional practice

I Share by default

I am Open, Transparent, Collaborative, and Social

My students own their own:   (Learning)

• learning process

• learning environment

• learning products

• learning assessment

My students belong to learning networks

Every student deserves customized learning

• Student voice

• Student choice

Every educator deserves customized learning

I have high expectations

I Care, Share, and Dare

I am a role model

I am the change I want to see in Education!

Final countdown

Just two more sleeps and the new school year begins. Some people get away for the last weekend, my wife and I almost never go away on this long weekend. We find it busy and our minds are too preoccupied with school. I’ll probably go in on Monday for a couple hours and make sure I’m ready.

Every new school year begins with so much promise, and this year feels especially filled with potential. I know we aren’t completely out of the covid cloud, but most of the restrictions we faced were to ensure there were not too many hospitalizations that we’d overburden our hospitals, and with covid cases being much milder, I think this year will be much more normal.

I never thought I’d be thankful for ‘normal’ but here we are. This year doesn’t need to be special to be good, it just needs to feel less restrictive, less focused on what we can’t do, and more focussed on what we’ve done well in the past. Rebuilding is not as hard as paving the way. The infrastructure is there, we know how to do it, we just need to execute well. But even that can be a little nerve racking looking at the whole year ahead.

Two more sleeps until the new year begins. I’m a little nervous, and quite exited about what lies ahead.