"...these are a few of my favorite..." tweets

   There are not enough teacher memes out there about school life in December. It is harried, and tiring, and exciting, and frustrating, and joyful, and…it’s essentially a paradox of emotions where time is moving too fast yet simultaneously not moving fast enough. Today was evidence of both lol.
   The weekends are no different, thus the reason I didn’t manage to get a Sunday night blog post written. Late night hockey games and getting home at 11pm doesn’t really help for motivation either.
   Because I am insistent upon not missing a week of blogging, but can’t manage to formulate a complex thought in my head right now, I’m perusing my phone for some recent posts I’ve saved from social media to share with you. Of course, tonight when I was checking my bookmarks in Twitter, I realized that nothing was saved from beyond a week ago. I’m hoping a quick update will find them again.  (IT DID! Whew.)
   So here is my collection, an homage to the perennial Christmas classic ‘My Favorite Things’ from “The Sound of Music” which, to be honest, I have never once seen from beginning to end. This is the part where I’ll see if my younger sister actually reads my blog…she is a musical aficionado and will likely be mortified that I’ve never watched it. This is likely a good time to add that, despite a couple of catchy songs, I can’t stand the musical “Grease” either. Ha ha.

On teaching:
   “The kind of teacher you will become is directly related to the kind of teachers you associate with. Teaching is a profession where misery does more than just love company – it recruits, seduces, and romances it. Avoid people who are unhappy and disgruntled about the possibilities for transforming education. They are the enemy of the spirit of the teacher.” Christopher Emdin @chrisemdin
    “The importance of focusing on behavior: A student’s behavior is a much stronger predictor of future success than test scores are, according to a large-scale study encompassing 574,000 ninth graders. Teachers who helped students improve their behavior (measured by things like attendance and suspensions) were 10 times as effective at improving their students’ graduation rates and GPAs as teacher who focused on test scores.” @edutopia
   “Social justice teaching is not a lesson or a unit. It’s about building a lens for students. So that students may look for social justice in all content areas and all classes and their personal lives and then some.” @PresidentPat
    “I always hear that our job as teachers is to prepare students for the “Real World,” like it’s some magical land far off in the future where kids and their experiences actually matter. My question is always “isn’t their world real now?” Brett Kirk @brettkirk97
    “Each school is a unique organism comprised of the collective struggles, history, & hopes of the community it serves. There’s no sweeping ‘fix’ for education just as there’s no curriculum that’ll work for all students. The only ‘fix’ is getting knee-deep in the humanity of it all.” Amy Fast @fastcrayon
  “We are not just teaching history as some detached narrative. If we do our jobs right, we are teaching our students how to see history around them, how to confront it, and ultimately how to see themselves in it. In those moments, the past and the present collapse.” Kevin M. Levin @KevinLevin
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On writing:
   “As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second change at biting into our experience and examining it…This is our life and it’s not going to last forever. There isn’t time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.” Natalie Goldberg
   “Continually ask yourself: what’s important? To you? To the author? To others? What’s interesting? New info? Connections? Surprised?” Tanny McGregor @TannyMcG
   “Fill the page with the breathings of your heart.” William Wordsworth

On being:
   “One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.” Gretchen Rubin @gretchenrubin
   “Things that are good for your planet are also good for your mental and physical health. Clean air, walking, working less, oceans, forests, plants, avoiding artificial chemicals. A kind, vibrant, verdant world is good for us. The ultimate act of self-care is to protect the planet.”  Matt Haig @matthaig1
   “No matter how many mistakes you make or how slow you progress, you are still way ahead of everyone who isn’t trying.” George Evans @kruevans
   “This is the path. These are the ingredients. But none of it is possible until, as the great theorist David Hawkins once said, we realize that ‘the more magic gift is not love, but respect for others as ends in themselves, as actual and potential artisans of their own learnings and doings, of their own lives, and thus uniquely contributing, in turn, to their learnings and doings. Respect for the young is not a passive, hands-off attitude. It invites our own offering of resources. It moves us toward the furtherance of their lives and thus, even, at times, toward remonstrance or intervention. Respect resembles love in its implicit aim of furtherance, but love without respect can blind and bind. Love is private and unbidden, whereas respect is implicit in all moral relations with others. Adults involved in the world of man and nature must bring that world with them to children, bounded and made safe to be sure, but not thereby losing its richness and promise of novelty.” Sam Chaltain @samchaltain
 
Tervetuloa. Welcome. Tawâw.
Edla.