Starting with the Why in 2012

Let's get real. As teachers, we get drilled daily on the "hows" and "whats" of all we're expected to accomplishing a class period, a day, a grading period, a semester, a school year. Staff meetings, evaluations, strategy meetings and red tape drain us and leave us feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. We get home to our families a leftover version of ourselves when they are asking for our best. We have only so many pieces in our pie and we unintentionally dished them all out between 8am and 3pm and it leaves us feeling pretty crumby at the end of the day. In the fog of fatigue, we start to lose sight of the joy of what made us choose this crazy calling in the first place--the why.

Good news: We are your cheerleaders! We want you to come home to your families with a bounce in your step. We want teaching to feel more like playing for you! You've come to the right place!

Buried underneath the data, test scores, piles of papers to grade, totes stuffed with clutter like their minds, is the why behind all the "what" that weighs us down. The reasons we started teaching in the first place. That look in our students' eyes when they realize "I didn't think I could do that! Look what I did!" The lightbulbs, the joy, the fact that no matter what their age, each one of our students is someone's baby.

But these faces gets buried each day in the stress of the piles in the day to day details of the how and what. We are forming a group of teachers that is determined to keep the "why" at the tops of our piles, the fronts of our minds, and the center of our hearts. Join us and rediscover the why!

"The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing.To him he's always doing both." James Michener

"What's your red rubber ball? What's your source of joy? What topics do you love to discuss and ponder? What dreams to do you chase? ... After all, where do dreams start? They start when we're playing, when we're free to run and romp around. That's when we imagine we're something bigger than we are. The red rubber ball represents play to me. It's any activity,topic or purpose that makes you excited about the day..." Kevin Carroll, Rules of the Red Rubber Ball