Day 3 – Keeping the Glass Half Full

This morning, as I was having my coffee, Ben poured himself some orange juice and said, “I have an idea! Let’s do normal!” Well, while I can’t promise that, I can engineer chicken parm night, and that was all Ben needed to declare, “Chicken parm? I’m a lucky guy!!!!!”

My school has not yet gone with remote instruction, but I recognize how hard the uncertainty is for both parents and kids. I know a lot of people are going a little stir crazy. The best thing I can think of is to try to turn this huge inconvenience into an advantage.

The pace of education has picked up significantly over the course of my career. Sometimes, as a teacher with deadlines and goals and PSSAs, I struggle to keep myself from pushing kids to go further faster. Maybe in this weird time, where we are all suspended in an odd fog of isolation, fear, disruption and technology, we should just step back and breathe. The world does not hang on a fifth grade text dependent analysis essay, or on an article detailing battles of the American Revolution (spoiler alert: we win). Maybe instead of firing educational experiences at our kids at warp speed, we just need to let them soak in all that’s already come their way. Maybe they just need time to think. I would love it if my students did at least some of these things in the days or weeks to follow:

1. Lose yourself in a book. 
2. Take a bike ride, a walk or a hike.
3. Practice something (like an instrument, or a song, or a Rubik’s cube, or a dance move, or a basketball shot, or a magic trick) until you have mastered it.
4. Make a Rube Goldberg machine.
5. Write a poem, a play, or a story.
6. Attempt to break a world record. (Hint: One of my best childhood memories is Joelle and I working awfully hard in about 6th grade to catch pennies balanced on a forearm. Why Guiness didn’t show up to film our skill is beyond me.)
7. Draw or paint a picture.
8. Invent a new game.
9. Make a treasure hunt.
10. Find a recipe for something new, make it, and eat it.
11. Dig out a toy you haven’t played with in ages.
12. Research your family’s genealogy.
13. Observe a living thing closely, and record your findings.
14. Find something you are curious about and conduct your own research.
15. Sew.
16. Fix something that isn’t working.
17. Create something.
18. Set up an elaborate line of dominoes and watch them fall.
19. Find a new use for an ordinary object.
20. Design and conduct a science experiment.
21. Climb a tree.

Obviously, high school and college students have far greater concerns and challenges than can be met by the suggestions above, but if fretting is your only other option, what’s the harm? I can happily report that I did all of the above things in my youth, most of them again in adulthood, and #1, 2, 4, 9, and 17 within the last week.

We would all rather be doing our regular thing, but until then, let’s keep the glass half full!