The Educational Cupcake-It’s not too late!

You know how resolutions go. You make grand proclamations to lose 30 pounds by summer and by week 2, you are eating cupcakes and feeling like that goal is even further away.  Fitness experts would tell you to let go of the past and just start again. If you ate junk at lunch, don’t wait until tomorrow, just make better choices for dinner.  Rarely are goals met without failures but you will never succeed if you let failure stop the process.

The same happens in our classrooms.  I know I have all these amazing dreams for what I want my classroom to be. I think I will come in like “superteacher” and all the kids will be engaged and gaining by leaps and bounds ALL the time.  But that is just not realistic. So, should I give up and eat the educational cupcake since it can’t be like my perfect dream in my head? Of course not, but we all do it.  We have dreams that start at the beginning of school and then by January, we realize all those dreams probably won’t be fulfilled.  I am sure you are so uplifted by this point in the blog but I am wanting to encourage us to start dreaming again.  Maybe they won’t be fulfilled the way you envisioned at first but the dream can still be pursued.

Let past disappointments and failures to be that…in the past.  Try that idea again. Your students are are a few months older.  You are a few months wiser. BE WISER, not more cynical.  As teachers, we are hard on ourselves. We need to show our kids that we learn from mistakes. We use the mistakes to know what NOT to do again.

I am imploring all of us to look through your favorites on twitter, bookmarked sites, pins of pinterest and try again! All those ideas that you hope to use one day. Let this be the year for your ONE DAY. It’s here! Try something new. If you fail, okay learn from it, make it better and try again. Contact that encouraging person on twitter. Collaborate on a project.  New ideas inspire me to be better. Enthusiasm and passion are contagious. Be the spark that not only lights a fire for you but for those around you. Let’s do this! We haven’t lost half the year already. That’s looking at the glass half-empty. We still have half of the year left to do amazing things with ourselves and our students.  Make it count!

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
― Winston Churchill