Spinning Plates and Juggling Balls
Yay for holidays I say! A time to relax, reflect and gain some sense of sanity! LOL
Humour aside, I do find that to be a Primary (Elementary) School Teacher I need to know how to spin many plates.
Now this clown may do it for entertainment but I don’t. I do it because I have too. I find all too often that the goal is to hold it together, rather than develop and improve what your doing.
Psalm 90v12 says: “Teach us to realise how short our lives are. Then our hearts will become wise.”
Are the plates I’m spinning actually worth spinning?? Maybe it’s time to let a couple of plates drop so that I can focus and improve a few of the things in my life? Or is it time to remove some stuff from the classroom? We have been talking about the “crowded curriculum” for some time now here in New Zealand - what therefore can we take out?
Looking back over the last 2 years only, I see a number of things that I have added to my “Teacher’s toolbox”:
- A range of Thinking Skills eg: Tony Ryan’s Thinkers Keys, Bloom’s Taxonomy, De Bono’s Thinking Hats, Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences.
- Formative Assessment: feeding forward and back (via conferencing, marking books, WALTs, etc)
- Inquiry Learning
- Classroom blog
- ICT Contract (with this comes new goals, stretching, conferences and meetings)
- Other Professional Development: readings via Twitter, Wiki’s, Centre4, my Netvibes account, etc.
These development are great and I have enjoyed growing as an educator, networking and integrating these new tools into the class. BUT it all takes time, energy and what we call “mental power”.
So these holidays for me are not only a chance to rest but also a chance to remember again my priorities. I am reminded of what my Syndicate Leader said to me at the beginning of the year:
“Life is a lot like juggling balls. However some of them are rubber and others are glass. The glass balls are important relationships in our lives eg: our spouse, family, etc. Drop the other balls if you need to but DON’T drop the glass balls.”
So the questions we need to ask ourselves are: What are the glass balls in my life? What balls do I need to drop?
