Where are you going, where have you been?

You can’t know where your going if you don’t know where you’ve been. As I continue to search for where the “next step” in my life will begin, meaning where I’ll get my first teaching job, I reflect on where I’ve been.

         When I think back I’ve been in a classroom, as a student, and as a teacher. I taught kindergartners how to write their names and spell their color words, and I taught seventh graders how to work together with their peers, friends and foes. You may not know that I was given a great opportunity to finish out a quarter teaching seventh grade science at Lamar Middle School. It was an awesome experience getting to work along side with many of my past teachers as well as teaching in the same classroom where my father was for 20ish years. Seventh graders although not much different from kindergartners, except maybe the hormones, taught me several life lessons as well.

         People want to feel loved. This is something that I ran into in both grades. And children, as well as some adults, will act out and manipulate to get the desired attention, no matter the cost. Why has it become human nature to want others to hurt when we hurt, to want others to be humiliated when we ourselves have been humiliated? I don’t get it. The Golden Rule: Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. Has as much president today as it did when it was created. Yet this rule continually looked over. This is crazy to me because it is the foundation for Peace.

-Take selfishness and turn it into selflessness.

-Think about others before yourself.

I challenge you to live by the Golden Rule for a week and see how much better you life is, then do it the next week and the week after and so on…

What’s Next

Graduating College is, what one would consider being, an accomplishment. Upon graduating graduates are celebrated then questioned. “Congratulations, now what’s next?”

What is next? For some who I’ve known my whole high school and collegiate carrier the next step is marriage, for some it’s the birth of a child, for some its heart ache. And as I’m repeatedly asked the question I answer with-- Tech, what else! But the reality hits and I am consumed with the anxiety of the “real world.” I guess I expected to be handed a job along with my diploma on graduation day.

Teaching is my passion; however, as I sit and observe the teachers in schools I am astonished at the amount of teachers who are counting down the days till the last day of school. When did teaching become more about yelling at kids and less about loving them?

Too many times we get caught up in moments and forget there are eyes upon us everywhere. As a teacher, as a coach, as administration, we are to be mentors each and everywhere in the classroom, in the gym, and in the community. We are shaping the minds of the next generation into believe its okay to disrespect, parents, friends, siblings, and teachers and ITS NOT!! What will become of the system. What's next for our schools, community, country?  

What’s next for me? …..to be still and wait.