Self care

I took a class last fall on social emotional learning. One of the big take-aways I got from it was about self care.

If you are not a good model of taking care of yourself, you are not going to be able to teach good ways to model dealing with stress and anxiety to your students.

That was something that I know I need to think about. 

Teacher stress contributes to teacher burn out. Not having the tools to deal with stress leads to people not being about to deal with being a teacher.

Holidays are stressful. Having to deal with family drama on top of having to think about evaluations, IEPs, and upcoming report cards is stressful.

So, my resolution to myself is to work on forming good habits. I've been reading Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin. It was a good plane read on my trip last week to New Mexico.

If a habit becomes automatic, you don't have to think about it. If you don't have to think about it, you don't have to worry about it. 

 Good habits that I want to work on:

1. Regular exercise.

2. Clear my desk before leaving at the end of each school day.

3. Put in systems to make documentation easy. The easier it is to show progress, the easier it is to talk about the progress that my students are making.

4. Spiritual connectedness. This is an area that I always identify as lacking in when I self evaluate my values.

Here is to looking forward instead of back. 

Happy Holidays