It’s just a bag of dinosaurs

As I begin to wind down at my present school, I’m noticing a few things about people that I will definitely need to remember and transfer as I make the leap to a new, bigger building. As I see it, sometimes educators get so caught up with the little things that we forget to step back and look at things from a much broader perspective. This past week there were a few things that reminded me that we need to really make sure we are getting excited about things that will matter not just something to create a crisis about this moment.

Point in fact, one of our younger students lost a bag of items from a reading backpack. Said bag was turned in but, unbeknownist to me, I gave it to a student who I thought owned it. Last week, more than a month later, it became a crisis of huge proportions as this bag was now the center of a massive hunt as 3 or 4 adults tried to figure out where it had gone. When I indicated that I gave it away, the crisis ramped up for now someone was going to have to pay for them – first the student and then the teacher – when in reality it was going to cost us about $6 out of our “rainy day” fund to replace the items. However, it was a major crisis as people ran around as if the sky was falling.

I recently had a student lose some work they were working on and that created a crisis. How could this student go back and rewrite the information after doing it once? Everyone was feeling bad for the student, except me, as I saw this as a learning lesson and, really, n0t a big deal. Heck, I’d spent more time doing budget plans and other documents and lost them. Nothing to be done but remember to SAVE often and get back at it. Yet, you’d have thought that this was a major crisis – it being an exam and all.

As we get closer to the end of the school year, I see more and more of how people handle the bumps of life and, unfortunately, many educators need to be reminded that, for the most part, many things are between a 1 and 2 on the 10 scale. A colleague of mine reminded me of this when they didn’t get a job for which they interviewed. “Really, it’s not a big deal. No one died or was hurt and I still have my job. It’s all relative” Now that’s the right attitude.

And when they leave…….

As educators, we need to help students understand that much of what happens that is a disappointment is something that is temporal and they will move on. For the most part, if they learn to deal with it in a constructive and positive manner, something will be learned and it will, hopefully, be avoided in the future. I become perplexed by how some issues become as big as they are and how people create a crisis when there really isn’t one there. Maybe they don’t have enough stress in their lives or something.

Students will need to deal with the unexpected and constant change as our society continues to evolve at breakneck speed. Being able to distinguish between the high importance needs and those that are small inconveniences will be crucial. This doesn’t mean we ignore what they see as problems but it does mean we help them to develop the skills necessary to begin to distinguish between highly important and low importance. If we allow the to treat everything as high importance, we will definitely create a situation where we have youth who are burnt out before they’ve had a chance to experience much of life. Really, we have to distinguish between what’s an important issue and what’s just a bag of plastic dinosaurs.