"Come on Mommy!" "Let's go play Mommy!" "Mommy can we play outside?"
This is what I hear my oldest son yell (because preschoolers only have one volume) on a daily basis. His little brother is not far behind with his bowl full of...energy. I swear I was going to say energy! I always want to play with them, but I can't help but find myself thinking of all the other things I have to do. The laundry and its never ending pile. The dishes that won't clean themselves. The homework I would love to pawn off on my husband, but alas he has his own work to do (Who's idea was it for both of us to go back to school at the same time?). When did playing become such a chore. Maybe I should follow my children and learn to stop and play for the enjoyment of it more often.
As you may have guessed, Playing is the habit I find the hardest to do.
Now the habit I find the easiest is Goals. It is easy to say what you are going to do. It is easy to say when you want to get it done. I find that making the time and effort is where a lot of people fail. Some goals are easy or have short amount of time to accomplish, other are hard or take longer. Some can be funny (I'm going to try and not mess this blog up) some can be serious (I want to learn more about using the web in my classroom) others are your own personal dreams (I want my boys to know I love them).
I once heard a women proclaim that "it isn't worth having dreams anymore". She had really been down in the dumps for a while and found that nothing was coming about in her life at the time. I believe that dreams are another form of goals. Many times a person will have goals to get to their dreams. I found myself really pondering that statement. I believe that you must always have a goal or a dream in life. If you don't have anything to work towards then how do you know where you are going? Its okay if you have goals that don't pan out. Sometimes the dream changes. Sometimes you learn something about yourself.
Being a lifelong learner is an interesting concept. I do not care for the term of learning being integrated with education for this term. Being a lifelong learner does not mean that a person must continually be in school, nor does it mean that they must always being going to training or professional development. Being a lifelong learner is to take the experiences if life and develop a new knowledge to enhance the life you are living at this moment. This can include more school over and above K-12 and work if necessary.
There is one person in my life that I thought of as a lifelong learner. Not surprisingly, it is the person I'm closest too, my husband! He is always reading something. He knows the strangest tid-bits of information. When we are out he will rattle off some off hand information and people look to me in wonderment of the truth. "I can't make this stuff up!" is my response. He is always encouraging me to continue to learn whether through reading or school or workshops. He is especially proud of me going back to school for this degree of which I feel I'm either relearning what I forgot or missed out in grade school. I am happy to realize that I am a lifelong learner even though it may be unintentional at times. My new goal (See! Too easy.) in life is to make sure I teach and encourage my children to be lifelong learners themselves.
Great Blog! You actually changed my way of thinking! I am one of those "goals are too hard" type people. Haha! I guess I have like mini goals, like getting out of bed when the alarm goes off. But in my adult life I have been afraid of setting goals because I had so many that didn't pan out. But you hit the nail on the head, I haven't had any idea where I was going until I started back to school! I think I am going to have a goal to set new goals (can I do that?). Thanks again for opening my eyes!
ReplyDeleteWhat's marvelous about not knowing what you want to be when you grow up is that you're always going up - so it's never to late to find that place for which you know you are meant. Those of us that follow our calling - yes, for true teachers it must be a calling - know we were born to be teachers. For many, this realization comes early. For others, trials at other professions have come first and our decision to teach comes later in life. I'm a prime example. At age 40, I've finally given in to the "calling" that has been nagging at me for years. Now, although scared and anxious, I'm excited to start on my journey, changing the lives of little ones.
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