Monday Motivator #14 2018-19

Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and relaxing time with loved ones!

THE POWER OF THANK YOU http://www.jongordon.com/positivetip/thank-you.html In the spirit of Thanksgiving this week I'd love to share with you the benefits and power of two simple words. THANK YOU. They are two words that have the power to transform our health, happiness, athletic performance and success. Research shows that grateful people are happier and more likely to maintain good friendships. A state of gratitude, according to research by the Institute of HeartMath, also improves the heart's rhythmic functioning, which helps us to reduce stress, think more clearly under pressure and heal physically. It's actually physiologically impossible to be stressed and thankful at the same time. When you are grateful you flood your body and brain with emotions and endorphins that uplift and energize you rather than the stress hormones that drain you. Gratitude and appreciation are also essential for a healthy work environment. In fact, the number one reason why people leave their jobs is because they don't feel appreciated. A simple thank you and a show of appreciation can make all the difference. Gratitude is like muscle. The more we do with it the stronger it gets. In this spirit here are 5 ways to practice Thanksgiving every day of the year. 1. Take a Daily Thank You Walk - I started this practice 15 years ago and it changed my life. Take a simple 10-30 minute walk each day and say out loud what you are thankful for. This will set you up for a positive day. I wrote more about this in The Positive Dog. 2. Meal Time Thank You's - On Thanksgiving, or just at dinner with your friends and family, go around the table and have each person, including the kids at the little table, say what they are thankful for. 3. Gratitude Visit - Martin Seligman, Ph.D., the father of positive psychology, suggests that we write a letter expressing our gratitude to someone. Then we visit this person and read them the letter. His research shows that people who do this are measurably happier and less depressed a month later. 4. Say Thank You at Work - When Doug Conant was the CEO of Campbell Soup he wrote approximately 30,000 thank you notes to his employees and energized the company in the process. Energize and engage your co-workers and team by letting them know you are grateful for them and their work. Organizations spend billions of dollars collectively on recognition programs but the best and cheapest recognition program of all consists of a sincere THANK YOU. And of course don't forget to say thank you to your clients and customers too. 5. Say Thank you and Goodnight – At bedtime reflect on your day, identify and share all that you are thankful for. If you have children you can read Thank You and Goodnight with them and add to it.

Monday Motivator #13 2018-19

The Station by Robert J. Hastings

Tucked away in our subconscious minds is an idyllic vision. We see ourselves on a long, long trip that almost spans the continent. We’re traveling by passenger train, and out the windows we drink in the passing scene of cars on nearby highways, of children waving at a crossing, of cattle grazing on a distant hillside, of smoke pouring from a power plant, of row upon row of corn and wheat, of flatlands and valleys, of mountains and rolling hills, of biting winter and blazing summer and cavorting spring and docile fall.

But uppermost in our minds is the final destination. On a certain day at a certain hour we will pull into the station. There sill be bands playing, and flags waving. And once we get there so many wonderful dreams will come true. So many wishes will be fulfilled and so many pieces of our lives finally will be neatly fitted together like a completed jigsaw puzzle. How restlessly we pace the aisles, damning the minutes for loitering … waiting, waiting, waiting, for the station.

However, sooner or later we must realize there is no one station, no one place to arrive at once and for all. The true joy of life is the trip. The station is only a dream. It constantly outdistances us.

“When we reach the station that will be it!” we cry. Translated it means, “When I’m 18, that will be it! When I buy a new 450 SL Mercedes Benz, that will be it! When I put the last kid through college, that will be it! When I have paid off the mortgage, that will be it! When I win a promotion, that will be it! When I reach the age of retirement, that will be it! I shall live happily ever after!”

Unfortunately, once we get it, then it disappears. The station somehow hides itself at the end of an endless track

It isn’t the burdens of today that drive men mad. Rather, it is regret over yesterday or fear of tomorrow. Regret and fear are twin thieves who would rob us of today.

So, stop pacing the aisles and counting the miles. Instead, climb more mountains, eat more ice cream, go barefoot oftener, swim more rivers, watch more sunsets, laugh more and cry less. Life must be lived as we go along. The station will come soon enough.

Hope you relax and enjoy time with family and friends during this Thanksgiving break!

Monday Motivator #12 2018-19

Happy Monday!

https://www.facebook.com/tallahasseedemocrat/videos/203475570550447/

Monday Motivator #11 2018-19

Doing what we ask our students to do can always make a big difference!

Get in the Pool: Teachers Who Write

https://www.choiceliteracy.com/articles-detail-view-print.php?id=2526

Ruth Ayres

I always wanted to be a writer. As a little girl, I kept notebooks and folders filled with loose-leaf pages of my latest novel. I wrote a lot of haunted-house stories and haunted-beach stories and haunted-cave stories. I wrote about small-town kids having fun and being curious and being friends and being heroes. I liked to write on the front porch on a swing my grandpa built. I put a towel across the seat and propped a pillow by the armrest. I stretched out my bony legs and wrote the whole afternoon. My glass of red Kool-Aid left a ring of condensation on the concrete porch, and bees buzzed from petunia to petunia. My brother named his rabbit Bev after Beverly Cleary because she was one of our favorite authors. I said, “Someday people will name rabbits after me, too.” “Probably,” Jeff said. He was good at letting dreams soar. I kept writing through elementary and middle school. In high school I took every single creative writing class that was offered. I wished there were more than two. I kept writing through high school, and words stacked the summer before I left for college. I became an English teacher and quit writing. Oh, I would write the assignments, but that wasn’t real writing. All you needed to do was read a few examples on file at the library and then spit back what the professors said in lectures. I always got an A and graduated with a transcript list of English courses followed by an A. I landed a job as a seventh-grade language arts teacher. I still didn’t write. After six weeks, I had a lot of students who didn’t write either. This correlated with a lot of students who had very low midterm grades. I couldn’t figure out why they weren’t writing. The assignments were interesting and full of choice. Who wouldn’t want to write about the world from the perspective of an ant or an eagle? Why didn’t they want to write personal narratives about a time when they learned something? What was so terrible about debating school uniforms? As the number of students who refused to write was on the rise, I became desperate. I began looking for things (worksheets) to keep them busy (quiet). My mentor, Tam Hess, invited me to go to a study group to learn about teaching writing. I hope I didn’t roll my eyes when she asked me. “I don’t think it will help. All of my students hate writing. Hardly any of them will try. Most just take zeroes.” I blinked back frustration. “I know,” Tam said, “but they give us snacks and a free book. We’ll have to leave school a little early, but I already cleared it with the principal. I’ll drive.” I shook my head. “Let’s just check it out,” Tam said. “You can sit in an hour meeting for snacks and a free book.” Reluctantly, I found myself sitting in a study group with teachers who were gushing about how much they loved teaching students to write and how much their students loved writing. I thought they were liars. Near the end of the meeting, we were to do something called a quick-write. I had brought my notebook, just like they'd asked me to do. It was brand new, one I'd picked up before school started. It was when I still believed I could be a good teacher. The quote on the front by Shunryu Suzuki said, “The world is its own magic.” I ran my palm over the cover of the notebook. It was too pretty for me to mess up with a quick-write. I flipped over the meeting agenda and used the back side for my quick-write. One of the teachers who gushed about how much her class loved to teach writers said, “The rules of a quick-write are simple. Keep your pen moving the entire time. Whatever comes to mind, write down. No thinking. Just writing.” She set the timer and I poised my pen over the paper. I didn’t want to write what was going through my head. I wasted tons of time and money for a college degree that would be useless because I was a failure as a teacher. Instead of helping kids become stronger readers and writers, I was poaching readers and writers. I watched the timer. I doodled in the margin. I stared out the window. And I remembered: I used to write. The memory invaded, and I felt like my beliefs about teaching were breeched. Maybe if I was going to fail as a teacher, I could become a writer. If I were going to become a writer, I needed to write. I began putting words on the page. No thinking. Just writing. Little did I know I had stumbled across the one thing that would save me as a language arts teacher. I became a teacher-writer. The next day I shared my quick-write with students and invited them to write a quick-write in their notebooks. “Do we have to write about ants?” Ashley asked. “Only if you want to,” I said. “I think you should write about an ant’s perspective on the world,” mumbled Tyler. He didn’t know I heard him. I set the timer, and we all wrote in our notebooks. I wrote about an ant’s perspective on the world and understood why my students were croaking as writers. I looked around. Everyone was writing. All I did was share my writing before asking them to write, and it was as if I'd waved a magic wand. The moment I became a teacher-writer was the moment I quit failing as a language arts teacher. It wasn’t difficult. I simply did what I asked my students to do. Then I shared it with them. The more I wrote and talked about my writing, the more my students wrote and talked about their writing. They became stronger writers because I started putting words on the page. If we want our students to grow as writers, then we must be teachers who write.

Ruth Ayres

Ruth Ayres is a full-time writing coach for Wawasee School District in northern Indiana. She blogs at Ruth Ayres Writes and is the coauthor of Day by Day and many other books, all available through Stenhouse Publishers.