Zipping Through What Keeps Me Down

Zipping Through What Keeps Me Down

Unfortunately, today has been one of those days when very little seems to even have potential for going right. As an eternal optimist, this really bugged me (and still does a bit). I like being an optimist, finding the silver lining hiding somewhere in every single situation, even if it’s tiny and I have to look really hard for a very long time.

Today this was much harder for me, due to certain individuals around me deciding I’m the best dump for their venting, yelling, and other icky feeling…junk. Having a nasty head cold and a gross feeling of allergies starting probably doesn’t help the whole situation, so I’ve put myself into my ‘Silver Lining Search’ mode. This helps me Zip through the crap, and then Zip it away to deal with it later in my writing – it’s surprising just how much I can use these days when I get through the junk, put it away for a while (I like to let it simmer until I need the passion that forms), and then choose a time to just write my heart out and see what comes out.

When temperatures (weather ones in this case) make things even tougher, I recommend a good nap in as cool of a place as possible, to help lower my internal temperature, which will then allow me to not let the junk get to me so easily. Today has been a surprisingly warm day (mid to upper eighties), and I was in a computer lab 95% of my work day, with less ventilation than I’d like, and that area of the A/C turned off while the maintenance department tried to solve the ‘it’s broken’ problem. When they realized that they had done that to the lab in the warmest part of the school day, I got quite a few apologies, and several students accepted those apologies with amazing amounts of grace.  Talk about a major silver lining – students who had been working on required testing, and had just been asking me about the heat in the lab, responded to people they had never met before with wonderful examples of grace. WOW!

Those moments are what help me Zip through the junk – the small tidbits of happiness, of kindness, of hope. A random surprise of a note from a friend, a wonderfully kind response to a necessary e-mail that could have inflamed recipients’ stress levels to extreme status. These things make it so much easier to get through the junk, and then be able to use it in the future.

I know there are stages to grieving and loss. I consider these to be a lot like the stages of zipping through the crap and then zipping it away.

First, denial, and often isolating yourself from the crap that feels like it’s attacking you. I never want to believe that someone is treating me badly (yeah, I see the good in everyone), and so my first instinct is that I misunderstood – even when I know I didn’t misunderstand at all. Then, I want to separate myself from the situation. Part of this is to protect myself from more being shoved at me while I deal, and part is to protect others from any chinks in my armor while I deal. I don’t want to take anything out on others, especially just because it happened to me. Plus, I’m usually an introverted loner, so being alone helps me to figure things out without any outside influences. I know this won’t work for everyone, but it does work for me, so Wahoo! =)

After the denial and isolation comes anger. I don’t lose control, but I do allow myself to get ticked off and snarl a bit. I usually vent into a journal, or to someone who will let me just vent (at this stage, I neither want nor need advice. Just a listening ear). I’ve had people who tell me that I shouldn’t get angry. Why the heck not? I’m human, and I feel all kinds of emotions. It’s healthy. The key is to make sure that I am in control, not my emotions. Plus, feeling the anger, in any form – usually frustration – allows me to make sure I don’t bottle it up and end up exploding (that sounds too painful, anyway), but can rather end up using it toward something useful – a really great workout, letting myself write a painful part of a story, really getting those stubborn weeds out of the garden, focusing better in my meditation – until the focus takes over – that kind of thing.

After anger comes bargaining – trying to regain control with figuring out why it happened (could I have prevented it, or can I make a deal somehow to prevent it in the future). This isn’t always a part that can happen for my situations, so I usually try to focus on how I can deal better in the future if I can’t avoid it completely.

Depression is supposed to follow bargaining, but I don’t do depression. Yes, I get down at times, but my version of a funk can be tossed in an awesome workout, writing, and snuggling my dog. Plus, there’s always reading and napping. When I start to feel down and don’t want to deal with it for very long, I try to do something nice for someone else – let my brain, body, and heart focus on making someone else’s life a bit better, even for a moment.

Finally, here comes the stage known as acceptance. Now, I don’t have to accept the way people treat me, I just have to accept that this happened, deal with it somehow, and move on. When I reach this stage, I know that if it happens again – even if I am pretty sure that it will, given certain circumstances – I’ll be better prepared and able to deal.

Zipping through stuff might not always be super speedy, but it is so worth it when I get there and can zip away the circumstances for a while. Moving on and then coming back and checking in with my reactions to the situation and what happened at that point helps me make sure I’ve actually recovered and moved on. Then, I can use the whole thing for a character, a scene, an emotion that I need to express in some way.

Then, I can take a nap, and catch some ZZZZZZZZZZZs! J

Thank you for your time!

J

Yay for Y!

Yay for Y!

The letter Y amazes me. It allows us to ask a question while texting, saving a whole two letters (man, my thumbs love that break, don’t yours?); allows us to learn the 25^th letter of the English language while watching Dr. Donald ‘Ducky’ Mallard do his amazing work on NCIS; takes on the challenge of acting as a consonant or a vowel – impressive resume, right? – and lets me celebrate with my Yay! response to students!

As an educator, I keep hearing how I need to tell students what they can and can’t do…and, unfortunately, that often turns into more telling kids what they can’t do rather than what they can do. I think it ends up being a self-preservation thing and almost an easier way to help sent boundaries for students to be safe. I’ve never really liked it, though, and yesterday and today I got to experience a training that I think will help me and my coworkers turn the ‘you can’t do this’ response into ‘you can do this other thing’ – which makes  me incredibly happy. Yes, making changes, especially this late in the year, does lend to the possibility of more resistance than we’d expect otherwise, so we’re taking a slightly different approach. Instead of changing all the rules from random to common ones this year, we’re just going to add a couple new games this year, get the kids excited, and show us all – students, staff, and community – that this is going to rock!

I love being able to say yes to students when they want to do something. I know I can’t always do that, but when I can, the warm fuzzy that fills me when I see the student(s) smile – is amazing! I’m hoping that this new program will help us get more yeses going on, which will then lead to celebrations and my beloved ‘yays’ – this is going to work, I know it! I’m not going to say a massive amount about the program right now, since I’m new to it, and can’t really give a whole lot of information, but I will say that the program is called Playworks – and can be found at www.playworks.org. Our trainers were Michael and Lynn, and they were completely wonderful. They said I can spread the word, so I am. I have a lot of hope for this program merging into our school’s community and culture, which feels absolutely stupendous.

Students – especially the young ones like those I work with – need boundaries. These boundaries help students feel safe and secure, which leads them to feeling better about themselves and more likely to try new things with new friends. The fact that the program will help us feel more success with making game rules the same across the board will ease stresses over the years as different staff members work with different students as those students grow up through our grades and new members of our community come in – we hope this will help alleviate the fears that so often come with joining in on the playground at a new school.

If we can get students engaged, we can help them learn more and more – about themselves, others, and all kinds of other great areas – and become learners for Life. That alone is work the biggest Yay I can give.

YAY!

What makes you cheer – what’s your Yay today?

J

X’s eXtraordinary Resume

X’s eXtraordinary Resume

Today, while contemplating what to write about for X Day of the A to Z challenge, I realized just how many things the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet does every single day for us. Quite a few letters work hard for us, like the letter B, who helps us make the motor sounds for a toy boat; S helps us speak to snakes; M allows us to express satisfaction with the taste of something; Z shows us snores and the sound a bee and mosquito make. All kinds of letters, all kinds of sounds, and all kinds of amazing things that each of them does to help us communicate. The letter X, while not used in this way. Does have quite an impact on our lives

Kisses

I have received many a letter and card from some amazing family members over the years that had kisses sent along with the mail included at the end in the form of X’s. I’ve heard arguments that the O’s that often accompany the X’s are the kisses, as they are shaped like kissy mouths, and the X’s are hugs, because some people feel they look like arms. I see the O’s as complete hugs and the X’s as kisses (pursed lips), so I will go with that. J X’s at the end of a letter let the recipient know how much the sender loves them, and receiving love is always a great feeling.

Treasure!

I have absolutely no idea whether real treasure maps exist, and if they do, do any of them actually have an X marking the map where the treasure can be found (provided the map was carefully followed, of course). I admit my dorkiness in life does extends to finding it completely hilarious when a movie involves a treasure hunt and the scenery actually includes a gigantic X under the characters’ feet denoting where the treasure can be found if they just look down. Yes, I do appreciate the far more subtle ways that movie makers of magic have characters find treasure, but the obviously dorky is sometimes the perfect solution. Plus, it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling of happiness that maybe, in some specific cases, things might end up being that simple. Every once in a while, anyway.

A Signature

I work in education, as I’ve mentioned many times before (running an elementary school library), so I definitely know the importance of literacy and how it can positively impact a life, and its lack can and will do the exact opposite. I love explaining to students how some people, who didn’t know how to write their names (this totally shocks them) would make their mark or X in place of their signature. I find this proof of illiteracy and the effect that it had on people’s lives is one of the best real world links for my students. Even my students with the most reading and writing difficulties can sign their names. That gives some of them great confidence. I’ve had students – at various reading ability levels – take that information and decide to improve their reading skills in order to get as far from that level of illiteracy as possible. Do I think less of those who cannot read? Absolutely NOT. I’m just really glad that so many of my students don’t want that as part of their futures. It gives me a great deal of hope.

Whether X marks your spot, shows you where you signed or indicated something, or makes you want to lay one on someone special, I wish you the best (and may all of your X’s marking countdowns toward something special rack up as quickly as possible).

XX (Kisses! What were you thinking? Tsk! J),

J

Weekends

Weekends

I love me some Weekends. A few years ago, I had an interesting conversation with…I’m pretty sure it was a student, but I can’t promise…about why Saturday and Sunday are considered the weekend. The result of the conversation was that we felt that the weekends should either be longer, or show up more frequently.

My job is fabulous and totally worth time and effort, but weekend are very symbolic for me. They stand for time – to breathe, sleep, do something I choose, on my own schedule, and with whomever I want. On a typical weekend, the majority of my chosen activity goes back and forth between sleeping and reading. As one of my fabulous nieces has said (and I totally agree) is that she and I are best friends with our beds. We cherish those relationships and refuse to let our best friends feel lonely or miss us. J As I write this, I am at an all-day meeting, writing this on my breaks. She, who is visiting this weekend (she just volunteered as one of the group counselors at my school’s Outdoor School event), is probably  - I hope, anyway – still asleep, as it is only mid to late morning.

I am not a parent to any human children. My babies of choice are of the canine persuasion, but I do believe that children, especially during those ever so fun teenage years, need a great deal of sleep. I keep reading more about how everyone – general population-wise – needs to get more sleep and receive all of those fabulous health benefits that decent nights of sleep apparently bring along for the ride (what, and miss out on working and stressing every second of every day? What are they thinking?). I go with the train of thought (choo-choo!) that children need more sleep than adults, due to the stresses on their bodies due to growing up. Teenagers, though, need even more beyond that of younger children because they have the added super stresses of the introduction of hormones to their systems wreaking havoc on everything.  *Insert big and impressive speaking voice: So, I say, let them sleep – and then let them sleep some more!*

As this lovely topic has me wanting to go and take a nap – apparently frowned upon while I’m in the meeting – I’d better switch topics! Weekends allow us to breathe, sadly a rarity for so many in the work force who are just trying to make ends meet (or wave at each other in a friendly fashion). So many people I’ve spoken to recently have been trying to get a second job – and I’m unfortunately looking at joining those ranks – which of course takes time, and makes breathing feel much more difficult.  I don’t relish the idea of giving up my Weekends, but realize that sometimes in order to achieve result A, preference X must be postponed for a bit. We shall see, I suppose. I’m kind of hoping to find out that I’m actually independently wealthy (by some weird timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly manifestation of a distortion in the space-time continuum) and can figure out things from that perspective. J

Understandably, quite a few people spend their Weekends catching up on what they don’t have time to do during the Week – laundry, grocery shopping, weeding the garden, and countless other needed chores that don’t seem to manage to complete themselves throughout the week. A good chunk of precious Weekend time often goes toward these endeavors, but at least they make the coming Week easier to manage.

Whether your Weekends are fun, boring, filled with Work or play, scheduled or random – I hope they are Wonderful.

J

Victory

My apologies. I wrote this post on time, and forgot to post it - something about falling asleep super early due to extreme exhaustion. I'll work on that. =)

Victory

I feel like I should have a t-shirt that proclaims ‘I Survived Outdoor School 2014’ – or ‘I Didn’t Drown at Outdoor School 2014’ – yeah, it was that wet.

I am so very proud of everyone at Outdoor School – ODS – because this was the wettest ODS I have ever seen, and we managed to get everyone through every part of the program, even though we had to make some adaptations in order to survive the deluges, like bringing one set of evening games inside so we didn’t drown the kids in the field that day (yep, deluges – impressive even for our areas – but we survived, so go us!).

One of my favorite Victories this year was that zero of our students had to go home early. We have the caveat  for ODS that if a student does something extremely unsafe, we call home, and that student’s parents drive up to pick up their student. At times, we have had students with such severe homesickness that we have had to call the parents to pick them up for that reason. Our focus and goal is always what is in the best interest of the each individual, as well as the whole group. This year, we had some homesickness, as expected, but all of our students got through it – yes! We even had students asking to stay over the weekend. While that didn’t happen, it was nice to hear that it was wanted.

Victories in public education are rarely about whether a student passed standardized testing (though we know it must be considered, and we do celebrate those successes) – at least at the local and individual school level. For those of us on the front lines of education, the Victories that truly matter are those that serve the individual student – moving up a reading level, learning a set of math facts, writing a really great paragraph (or, for earlier successes, writing a full paragraph), learning an new social skill, trying a new food or game, or something else that is individualized to a student. We know  - boy, oh boy, are we aware – that we have to have students complete their required testing, and we do so and hope that students do well in that area, too, but that is not truly the way we find Victories. I like our way better (but I also do a great deal of testing at my school, so that might have influenced my feelings on the subject just a tiny bit).

Victories can be miniscule or vast, public or private, and any combination of those or other qualifications. Victories can be having the most points, or achieving a personal record; reading that book you have been dying to complete for years, or having a house plant not die in over a year. They are personal, even when they apply to an entire group.

May your trials always end in Victory.

J

Understanding and Umbrellas

Understanding and Umbrellas

Greetings! I’m sticking with an Outdoor School RAD path, as you will hopefully be reading this on Thursday, while I’m still at Outdoor School! If not, I’ll post it when I get home on Friday! Today we’re talking about Understanding and Umbrellas.

Umbrellas are not allowed at Outdoor School – too many things can go wrong (makeshift sword fights, favorite Umbrellas that were gifts from Uncles or second cousins twice removed – drama ensues, I kid you not), and using them removes students from the experience of...experiencing. No matter the weather, Outdoor School goes outdoors. We all prep for this, and go outside and learn, experience, and start to Understand. The one regret I have for no Umbrellas at Outdoor School is I can’t use that opportunity to get some of my more musical students to do a rendition of “Singing in the Rain” with me, which is a sad state of affairs. *moment of silence* I’ll deal, though, to help my students Understand more and better.

Understanding their nature-based surroundings is not something these kids are used to doing if it isn’t at a mall or home in front of a game console – or taking care of younger siblings while parents work long hours to make ends meet. This is one of the many reasons why I love that we have an Outdoor School program. Take a bunch of 5^th graders, give them an opportunity to learn Science outside, away from the school, their families, their responsibilities to everyone and everything except being a kid who is learning…and you get amazing results. I’ve had students who thought they would ‘simply die’ – their words – without their precious cell phones who take said phones from parents when they are picked up, tuck the cell phone away, and ignore it. A few have even handed it back with a ‘nah’ – much to their parents’ shock. More students tend to want to go outside after Outdoor School, so our potential for students who move, exercise, and get fresh air increases wonderfully.

Having students Understand themselves better after Outdoor School – yes, they CAN survive away from home for a couple days, and even have fun! Yes, they can try new foods, go to bed at a reasonable hour, and not overdose on sugar and caffeine every day. They can go outside and try new things. They can learn science where it lives – what a concept, right?  They, too, can become field researchers in science, and even those who have the greatest trouble with it otherwise, can Understand an amazing amount of information and number of concepts.

So, their hair may get messed up by the rain since they have to go without Umbrellas, but that rain sinks into their brain and sloshes around with some ideas Until a new Understanding is born.

It’s a gorgeous sight to see!

Thanks for your time,

J

Trees

Trees

Hi there!  If I am able to schedule my posts to actually post as I hope and plan, you will read this while I’m surrounded by Trees at my school’s Outdoor School program for 5^th graders. I think I will be getting ready to Teach a class we call Tree Time. This class is a great class to help kids understand Trees and what’s going on around them, hopefully helping them gain an appreciation for the world in which they live. The fact that it is a very simple class to Teach is a major bonus. One year, the kit for the class got left behind on accident, and I was put in a position to Sink or Swim.

So, I made stuff up to entertain the group I was with (until someone could bring up the kit), and – since I knew some stuff about Trees, thank goodness – ended up giving them the info that was in the kit to a pretty good extent. Though the Tree Time kit has Tree cookies in it, which are always cool for the kids.

Step one: Take a Tree cookie – this is a slice of a Tree branch or trunk that shows a complete circle and allows the Tree’s rings to be counted and observed. I dare students to count the rings on their Tree cookie. The outer ones are pretty easy, and watching them go cross-eyed as they try to keep track of the inner rings adds extra entertainment for me.  We talk about what they notice and how each one is just a little bit different because they come from different Trees. We have a piece of a Tree where a branch attaches to the trunk, so students are able to see what that looks like (pretty cool, I must say), and compare that to their Tree cookie.

Step two: we Take a walk. The camp where we have our Outdoor School program is surrounded by Trees, and has definite paths, so it’s a safe and easy walk to take 5^th graders on and not worry about losing them. We always pass two Trees that have been a buffet for woodpeckers, and I love hearing what the students think caused those holes. My favorite over the years had something to do with an alien treasure box being  accidentally transformed into a Tree, and the very tiny aliens were coming at night to try to dig another hole in the trunk to find their treasure. This took all ten of us – counselors, kids, and me, to come up with – we obviously rocked it!

Step three: well, step Two and whatever throughout the lesson. A couple years ago, my best friend/brother-from-another-mother came to volunteer as a counselor. He had a great group, and we decided on the spot that whenever  we called out a time (12:47!), they had stop everything (movement and noise), and point to a Tree. Our reasoning was that the class is called Tree Time. It worked, and has continued since then. Yes, we are dorks. Yes, we own it. J

Step four: return group to starting place, and wait for new group. See? Not a hard class to teach. I only will do it Twice, I think, since I’m covering for someone who can’t make it up until afternoon one day, but I plan to have fun with it.  My favorite part is seeing what the 5^th graders – who think they will die without their phones and gaming systems for three days – notice and how excited they get over a Tree and it’s life story.

1:36! (Did you point? J)

Go have some Tree Time for yourself! Enjoy your surroundings. Take deep and cleansing breaths. And Relax!

Enjoy!

J