With the Best of Intentions

With the best of intentions, I open up a notebook to a fresh sheet of paper every year on January 1st. Pencil scribbling across the pages, I write a list of things I want to accomplish during the coming year.

I usually lose the list by mid February.

I love making goals. I love working towards something. However, more often than that, life happens. It gets busy, and my goals and resolutions fall to the side faster than the dinosaurs went extinct.

This year is different.

This year, I'm not making any resolutions (I am resisting the urge to slip in the "my resolution is no more resolutions" joke).

I am, however, developing a theme for the year that will guide it.

Be intentional.

Intentional with every aspect of my life.

So often, I drift through life somewhat aimlessly, the days passing by like wispy clouds on a spring day.

No more.

I want to be intentional with my time. If I'm looking up something on my phone, I don't want three hours to pass without me even realizing it (I can't be the only one this happens to, right?). Time is precious and valuable. I want to be aware of how I use it.

I want to be intentional with my money. Money is easy to spend. I rarely make big purchases (not on a grad student budget!), but lots of little purchases add up, and, suddenly, I wonder where my money went. I once heard someone say that if you want to know what someone cares about, look at his or her bank account. Um. Yikes. If you looked at my bank account, you'd see a lot of hot chocolate, food, and clothes.

I want to be intentional with my actions. It's not enough to talk about changing the worlds and loving other people. I actually have to do it. Good intentions disappear into the air, actions are grounded into reality.

I will be intentional.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Magic of Reading: Incorporating the Joy of Books into the Classroom

Image
At the beginning of the school year, I try to set a few areas that I want to focus on throughout the year. Some of the goals never quite come to fruition (let’s be honest, my desk is still a hot mess, despite my lofty ambition to organize it weekly) while others are slightly more successful. One of my goals was to create a culture and love of reading in my classroom. I had the opportunity to attend the Reading Summit hosted by Scholastic last summer and hear Donalyn Miller speak (she’s the QUEEN of the reading world), and I was left to reflect on my own practice. If I teach phonics and the elements of a story but the kids despise reading, what have I really taught? Reading should be transformative. Empathy, perspective, compassion, imagination, and creativity are all nestled between the pages of a book. If we never allow kids to experience this, then we’re truly doing them a dangerous disservice. This is not to diminish or ignore the critical role of phonics, phonemic awareness, st
Read more

Nothing Without Joy: The Role of Play, Curiosity, and Wonder in the Classroom.

Image
You only need to spend five minutes with a group of five-year-olds to realize that they are natural explorers, questioners (look up the statistics for how many questions a day a child that age asks!), and storytellers with an innate sense of wonder.  The world is big, and they are eager to find out more and make sense of it. In an article I recently read about asking beautiful questions (link at the end), it quotes Neil Postman as saying, “ Children enter school as question marks and leave schools as periods .” This is perhaps one of the saddest statements I’ve read about education in awhile. There have been countless studies conducted about the role of play, wonder, and questions in education. In spite of the research support, however, so much of education falls into the “one size” fits all trap of standardization. Although there is a shift towards critical, creative thinking, it is not complete or fully embraced yet within the structure of education as a whole or reflect
Read more

Reopened

His eyes held a library of books that were now dusty and forgotten. "Hi, Grandpa." I squeezed his hand, his skin paper thin. He blinked. "Hi," he croaked, tilting his head to the side. "Who are you?" I should be used to this by now.  But I wasn't. I swallowed around the growing lump in my throat. "It's me, Erica. Your granddaughter." Who lives right across the street and visits you every day. "Oh." He shifted his gaze to the flickering newscast in the background. I lowered myself onto the couch. This wasn't the grandfather I'd grown up with. I had fuzzy warm images of going to church with him every week, bumping up and down in his stormy gray truck. I could still hear him playing his harmonica or relating stories about attending the county fair as a boy, words tumbling out on top of each other. We sat in silence. Some silences are comfortable, refreshing, like dipping your toes into the pool on a
Read more