It's About Being Healthy

The more I think about this journey that I am on this year of changing my thinking I have realized that it really is more than just having a clean house. It's not just changing my thinking about my cleaning processes it's changing the way that I think about my life! I think I have been content for too long to just take life as it comes. To roll with the punches as it were but to always be REACTIVE rather than PROACTIVE.

When you are Reactive you tend to get frustrated easier. You spend your days waiting for the next thing to happen and not to create things that will make your life easier. What's funny for me is that on my working side I work hard at not being reactive but to have meaningful activities that cause me to create the learning environment that I desire for the children in my classroom. Why then can I not seem to do that at home? That's a good question and one that I have been pondering....it seems that since I am good at being Proactive at work I should easily be Proactive at home...but I am not. When I get home I am tired, I am often hungry, I am crabby from the situations that have gone on in the classroom and the last thing I often want to do is doing anything.

So today is Martin Luther King Jr's birthday. I am home from school since its a holiday and working on projects around the house. I need to make a new weekly goal but since I haven't really mastered the first two goals I should get into better habits with them. My desire is to develop GOOD habits but if I rush and take on too much I am afraid that it will be easy to slip back into my really bad habits. I have decided that this will be a Review week...when I teach we have review weeks for the children to reinforce the lessons we have learned. It's a healthy thing to be reviewing...change and learning doesn't happen overnight. It's a process by which we grow and mature...I'm still taking baby steps here...I have a long way to go in my goal and I have a whole year in which to accomplish this goal. We are only 18 days into the new year...I don't have to be perfect or even amazingly better this soon in the process.

I'm a firm believer in the process rather than the product in the classroom. A lot of the art that my students do is not something that I would hang on the walls but it is a skill that they are mastering...they are not going to be great at cuttting with scissors the first day but as time goes by and they master the process of using scissors their cutting skills improve so much. So my process is making sure that I am meeting goals 1 and 2 all this week. If I accomplish some bigger projects as I go along the way that is a benefit but not a neccessity. I will be content with being Proactive in the small things so that I no longer have to Reactive to my life. It's about being healthy in my thinking not just about killing myself for a goal that I think I need to meet quickly.