when breathing isn’t part of the curriculum


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On Tuesday, a bunch of students were gone for track and drama day during my 6th hour class, so the remaining students proposed that we go outside.

“Is it nice out?” I asked.

“70 degrees,” several said in unison. In unison.

“But I was going to give you time to read today,” I said (half-heartedly trying to build a case for staying put).

“We will read at home,” one spokesperson stated, with authority.


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We went outside. We ran around in the grass. We made funny faces and played with a magical substance. We admired the color of blue in the sky and the puffiness of the clouds. In other words, we made the right decision.

No regrets. This simple deviation from the schedule is something they were still celebrating on Wednesday. Most of the kids read the assigned reading too. Even if we had stayed inside, some of the students would’ve read the assignment and some of them wouldn’t have read it.

Tuesday was a good reminder that I need to build in more time to breathe, to soak in sunshine, to move, to be silly for the sake of it. It doesn’t necessarily connect to our curriculum. Building this time in will help improve relationships with students AND add to our overall health as individuals.


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On Overparenting

Walk towards the light

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Jessica Lahey: We really need to stop looking to our kids for validation. They are not extensions of us, nor indicators of our performance, and it’s unfair to saddle them with that responsibility.

Julie Lythcott-Haims: Yeah. And our need for validation needs to be taken up with a therapist, not imposed on our kids’ existence. As Carl Jung said, ‘The greatest harm to a child is the unlived life of the parent.’

~ How Schools Are Handling An ‘Overparenting’ Crisis


This is NOT a judgment on ANY parent who reads my blog. I am an imperfect person and parent and I am definitely guilty of some of these overparenting “sins” (e.g. driving an assignment that one of my daughters has left at home or in my car to her school … or signing something digitally that should’ve been signed a week ago on paper … ) In fact, I did this yesterday. My daughter needed her paper signed, but she left it in my truck. Instead of just letting her experience a consequence, I drove it to her. I “rescued” her. I allowed her to be a damsel in distress. I shouldn’t have done that. 

Overparenting IS a thing. I’ve noticed it as a teacher and a parent and I acknowledge that it is an individual parent issue but that it is also a systemic problem. The unwieldy goals we (as in we, a society) expect students to attain at younger and younger ages puts unneeded pressure not only on kids, but on their parents as well.

Image is everything in the United States. We (the collective, general parent we) don’t want to look bad in the eyes of the school (as in the people who work at the school) or of other parents, so we protect not only our kids from failure but our own images in the eyes of others. It doesn’t help that, as a mom, who knows other moms, I know that some moms judge each other. That IS a thing too. As a teacher, I know that some teachers judge parents based on factors that they shouldn’t. And so that IS a thing as well. (Conversely there are some parents judging teachers based on things they shouldn’t too … ) So, we all know that we are all silently judging each other and some of us are just vain enough to worry about what other people are thinking–so much so that we manipulate our own image and the images of our children to portray the things we think we want to be (or what other people want us to be) rather than what we are. Humans are inherently judgey. And inherently vain. And inherently insecure … so it’s no wonder overparenting exists. We are all on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Letting your kids suffer natural consequences is GOOD for them. Having a 4.0 is overrated. One of the best things that ever happened to my oldest daughter was getting a B. Bubble popped and she survived. This helped her understand that she was still a valuable human being–even though she no longer carried a “perfect” GPA. Guess what happened … She still got a good scholarship at a school she wanted to attend in the program of her choosing.

You get a detention for not having your assignment done? BOOM. No one hurt you or berated you (too extensively) for said detention, and you survived, but you sure remembered your assignment the next time, right? You forgot your lunch … Well, you might be really hungry when you get home tonight, but you have enough energy in your body to survive until dinner, and I bet you’ll remember your lunch tomorrow. You waited until the last minute to do the project you’ve had weeks to do? Hmmm … you might squeak out some C-level work there at the end, and it might not best reflect your learning and it may affect your overall grade, but that’s better than having your mom finish it for you so that you can maintain your 4. POINT. Oh.

Allowing our children to experience and more importantly SURVIVE failure is one of the best things we can do for them. If there is someone judging you based on your child’s inability to remember gloves day after day after day, despite blizzard-like conditions, not only does Judgey McJudgerperson need a new hobby, but you can find friends who will commiserate with you rather than scrutinize you for the inconsequential anyway.

I love what Jessica Lahey says about our children NOT being extensions of us as parents. It’s not fair to the parent to view a child as an extension of herself and it is certainly not fair to the child–who is her own person, with her own mind, and her own need to experience and learn first-hand. This process (known as “growing up”) can be painful for the child and the parent, but failure is the best way to learn.

I speak from experience. I am a failure. I have been a failure time after time, which is why I know what I know (which is infinitely tiny compared to what I could know). I learn so much more when things are a struggle for me than I do when things are going well. I’m not saying it’s NOT nice to have things go well, but it’s also good to temper the easy-breezy with some learning. We owe it to our children to back off and let them learn some things “the hard way” too.

Parenting is not for the weak, but neither is life. Letting our children fail in safe ways when the stakes are lower (e.g. letting them go hungry at lunch for one day) will prepare them to be adults who can handle life–even when it’s hard.

On Bravery

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There are different kinds of bravery.

If you say an act takes bravery it does not diminish other acts of bravery. It does not lessen the courage that another act takes. It doesn’t make anyone else less of a hero.

Who owns the word courage? No one. No one person owns any word or color or cause.

For some courage means fighting for other people’s freedom and comfort. For some, it is heroic just to get out of bed. For others, it is admitting publicly who you truly are.

You might not recognize someone’s act as being brave, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not.

Know that one type of bravery does not weaken the others.

My bravery is not better than your bravery; it is just different. It’s still bravery!

Usually once you understand something, it becomes less of a threat. Sometimes it’s a small tweak in perspective that can change the way you see the whole world. Often, once you understand people who are different than you, you can love them. On occasion, it’s seeking understanding that takes bravery.