Let’s Be Real: Education Does Not Have to be a Haunting Experience 🎃 👻 🔮 😱 🦸‍♂️ 🦸‍

10.31.2020

🎃 For many [elementary] teachers and students, Halloween is full of fun! There’s costumes, parties, picture-taking, and candy. While it’s still important to maintain structure and a schedule (see link for routines), Halloween can be a fun diversion from the daily grind that kids, parents, and teachers have been riding for about eight weeks straight since the first day of the school year.

👻 Many of us can agree that the beginning of school year 20-21 has been unlike any other. The new challenges have “haunted” many families, teachers, and administrators. Let’s not forget to mention the school nurses, secretaries, and custodians. Each person is dealing with their own set of “scary” moments, mainly in the form of stress, anxiety, and uncertainty.

🦸‍♂️ 🦸‍♀️ I’ve listened attentively to parents and teachers alike share their woes about childcare, finances, managing schedules, and fulfilling the responsibilities of their professional jobs..all while juggling to instill responsibility within their own children/students to show up to their virtual classes on time, checking emails for missed work, and getting it all done. These are the true superheroes today and always. Their problems are hauntingly real, but so are the solutions. 99% of these woes are figure-out-able.

🎃 As we celebrate Halloween today, which is also the two-month mark of school being in session, it is clearer to me that our students’ new ways of learning and accessing their learning is extremely complex. Mainly because there is a greater need for all things Executive Function: time management, planning tasks, task organization/initiation/completion. It can, however, be dealt with in a way in which everyone wins. The way to winning is by sharpening your own Executive Function tools as a parent and/or teacher so that the kids can continue to sharpen theirs. This is the way to find the exit out of this metaphorical haunted house many think they are living in.

👻 Today, while enjoying all the fun moments Halloween brings, consider thinking about how you can bring happiness into your home for the next two months of the school year. Celebrate the achievement of making it through these past two months and devise a concrete plan to making it through the rest of 2020.

🔮 Having plans and having the ability to pivot brings positivity. The higher the positive vibrations you as a parent create in your home or you as a teacher create in your classroom, the higher the likelihood that your child will feel them and feel good about being there. This promotes healthy conversations, kids fulfilling their daily tasks (such as chores, logging for class, and assignments), and overall happiness. Happiness also decreases stress and promotes immunity, which is fundamentally priceless as we enter colder temperatures and flu season.

🦸‍♂️ 🦸‍♀️ As we move into November, take it one day and one week at a time. While things seem to change at the drop of a hat and incite “hair-raising” reactions, our children are watching us. Either we show them that these “weird and dark” times are opportunities for complaining or they are opportunities for pivoting and leaning into resilience, patience, and flexibility. Be the super-heroes that we would like them to be as well.

🎃 👻 🔮 😱 🦸‍♂️ 🦸‍♀️ So, whenever a new chilling event happens and you feel that 2020 is sending another “BOO!” your way, remember that it’s not for long, you are capable of managing it, and you are going to masterfully convert the “darkness” into forces for good.