During this chaotic season of the school year, we teachers are under a lot of stress, as we have been "on" since late August/September with almost no breaks! Thus, it is imperative that we take a moment to step back and reflect on all of the blessings that have been bestowed upon us.
In no particular order, here are my Gratitude Snaps (excuse the fact that it's more of a list than a series of pictures.)
1. I am grateful for my community. My 20s was quite a journey - tremulous at times, but all of my experiences brought me to my current place of work, and I am grateful every day for the community in which I teach. I always feel that my co-workers, the parents, and even a majority of the students have my back and are supportive. I can run into any of these people outside of work, and I can always engage in conversations with them. Many of my students stay in touch after they graduate from middle school, and I often find myself attending plays and sporting events at local high schools, cheering on my former students. I moved far away from home, about 500 miles away from my family, to take this job, and my community has become my (rather large) second family.
2. I am grateful for my family. No matter how far away I am, I know I can always rely on my family for support and can call any of them at any time if I need anything. They support me in my endeavors, and I feel an unconditional love for and from them.
3. I am grateful for my friends. It sounds like a cliche, but the older I become, the more I realize that it is very difficult to maintain friendships in adulthood. Everybody is on his/her own schedule, and very rarely do we all get breaks. I am thankful particularly for the fact that I have maintained friendships that date back to early childhood days, and that no matter what happens to me in my adult life, I know that my childhood friends will always be around for me, and I for them. It's wonderful to have many familiar faces to visit when I go home for holidays.
4. I am grateful for my job. In my early 20s, it was a struggle for me to find a full-time job. Then, once I acquired one, it was a struggle for me to find a full-time job at a stable school, and a full-time job with which I was happy. Thankfully, life unfolded the way it did, and I have worked for the last four years at a job I love with caring administrators, room for creativity, and a supportive community.
5. I am grateful for my education. My parents worked very hard to be able to live in an area with an excellent public school system that prepared me for success at an excellent university. I am thankful to have had the resources available to me to get into my first-choice university. I am thankful that my parents were supportive of every decision I made in regards to what I wanted to study, even if it was a field in which they had little expertise. I am thankful for the scholarships I received to help me along the way and the like-minded, ambitious people I met with whom I shared many happy memories in my college and graduate school years.
6. I am grateful for my health. I can get up in the morning, ready to face the day. The world is my oyster. I do not have limited mobility, and even though my health is not 100% perfect, the condition I have is mild and treatable and does not impact my quality of life. I had a major surgery at a young age and came out of it perfectly healthy. I do not have to spend a lot of money on medicine at this point in my life. I strive to live a full life.
7. I am grateful that I have food, clothing, and water. No explanation needed.
8. I am grateful that I am literate. "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." -Mark Twin. Thank you, books, for being in my life, and thank you, literacy and everybody who worked to help me learn to read and write in my younger years, for enabling me to enjoy great books and share my own ideas!
9. I am grateful that I live in a country in which my gender does not limit my opportunities. I am constantly reminded of this every year when I teach Deborah Ellis' The Breadwinner to my sixth grade students. Talk about taking one's basic freedoms for granted...!
10. I am grateful for my artistic abilities. I have loved drawing and creating things since I was very young. Drawing and painting pictures relaxes me and just makes me happy. I have used these gifts to show appreciation to others and plan to continue drawing and painting for years to come.
11. I am grateful to live somewhere in which I am unfamiliar. It was a difficult decision to pack up my belongings and move 500 miles away from my family and most of my friends more than three years ago, but in doing this, I have the opportunity to explore a different part of the country and surround myself with new places and people. There is a lot of history in the area surrounding my current place of residence, and I am exploring it, bit by bit, in my free time.
12. I am grateful to have opportunities and the ability to make choices for myself. Period. Sure, I may be indecisive and unsure about exactly how my life unfolds from here, but I am thankful that I have choices and open doors. I have been so blessed to have a large number of opportunities to participate in some incredible experiences in the past, most recently my two-week teacher institute through the National Endowment for the Humanities!
13. I am grateful for cats. They make the world a better place, in my opinion. I only wish I was in a living situation in which I could have one of my own. A special shout out to our 15-year-old family cat, Swirl, who lives with my parents and is, in herself, always a great incentive to buy plane tickets home! I also love visiting and supporting animal shelters in my area, and when I still lived at home, I volunteered at an animal shelter a couple times per week. It was a blissful experience!
14. I am grateful for Twitter and my PLN. Ugh, I am so late to the game with Twitter. It was introduced to me as an educational tool during my master's program, and I failed to see its value as an educational tool back then. Thank goodness I have seen the error in my ways and use it now. There are so many inspiring teachers to follow, and I love engaging in EdChats! I learn new tricks every day!
15. I am grateful for technology. Where would our world be without it? Honestly. Sure, in some ways, it causes a lot of problems, but, if we remember Friar Laurence's soliloquy in Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 3, "Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied." If we use technology correctly, incredible things can happen: we can maintain relationships from a long distance. We can more easily connect with strangers who may possess knowledge that would be useful/helpful to us. We can have our students write letters to authors of books and have the authors reply (I definitely did that earlier this year.) We can connect ourselves to information in just a split second!
I will work on the rest of my gratitude snaps in the days ahead, but I just wanted to write this out, since I had some spare time with today's...dun dun dun...SNOW DAY! (Gasp!)
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