Lessons

With the onset of Spring, I've found myself immersed in Spring sports. I am always nostalgic this time of year when I go to a home track meet. I coached track for several years and was fortunate enough to have some very successful teams and individual athletes during that time. Just visiting a track meet brings me right back and I can't help but talk to athletes and start coaching them. That was fueled this week when I read an article (you can find it here) about the life lessons that the author learned from her high school track coach. There are so many things in this article that I remember teaching my athletes and so many of them that translate directly to the classroom for students and that I still try to instill in us as educators on the same team. Out of the 12 lessons mentioned in the article, I found 2 that I think are pretty applicable to us this time of year. 

Lesson #7 - Take a Rest Between Seasons - 

"You'll come back stronger; I promise. This one was really hard for me. I'd eagerly ask my coach every year if I could compete in cross-country finals on Saturday and start track season on Monday. But he'd always make me take a solid week off and away from the team, with zero exercise. This one was hard for me. Learning how to rest is not easy, but it's so essential to avoiding both injury and burnout."

Many of us are at the point of saying that if we can "just make it through next week, we'll be fine." I get that, and trust me, even as the principal, I feel the same way too sometimes. I strongly encourage you to use next week wisely and set yourself up to fully relax during Spring break. Even if you can have your copies, grading and lessons ready to go for the Monday that we return ready, it will give you that full week of rest that can be worry free. Set yourself up to rest and then do just that.

Lesson #12 - When it's hard, try to laugh -

"A little humor can ease up any hard practice and make it fun. For my coach, it was his self-deprecating jokes that had us in tears during chilly interval workouts. So crack a joke when the going gets rough, because we could all use a little bit more laughter in our lives."

Sometimes, even when you are trying you're heart out, things don't go as planned. It's at that point that you really have 2 options to respond: complain or laugh. Complaining won't make you feel a bit better, but laughing always will. If you can practice this with your students, it will help them just as much. So in the spirit of laughing at self-deprecating jokes, enjoy this picture of an 18 year-old me. A track-ready, 130 lbs, skinny-necked kid that thought he was the coolest thing ever. He definitely wasn't.