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Report from the Field – Craig West
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4 thoughts on “Report from the Field – Craig West”
This is great, Craig! WBYT, I’m finding is subtle enough to forget completely but is so important. I find I’m still thinking often of what’s coming next, and thus, a little on the anxious side, and so I say the word first and then write it down. When I’ve done it well, I notice it because I’m calm. When I don’t do it, I’m not calm. That’s just me, but I appreciate your reflection!
Yes! One of the things I want to focus on this year is pausing and taking deep breaths to center myself, and most of all, to pace myself. I want to work on keeping my energy for my family, and life outside of school, as well as for my afternoon classes!
What we do can be easy or it can wreck us. We are responsible for what happens to our minds and bodies and how we feel after school each day. I personally could write a book on how early on in my career it was a f—– up drive for the approval of fools that almost killed me. There was so much stress! But I slowly turned it around. One reason I am so big on the new curriculum is connected to this topic of mental and physical well-being, and not because I think I can get higher test scores, which can be damned for all I care.
The mental health piece is HUGE. Being out of the profession for 9 years, but still knowing many people in education, I would ask them about staff morale in schools, administration, employee turnover, etc., and sadly, 99% of the time, it was a negative. On top of that, in my last job (I was in higher ed), out of a staff 10, half of us were former teachers.
People are stretched thin nowadays and getting paid less. There was a report on CBS news where it was predicted that 25% of America’s colleges will fail in the next 2 decades primarily due to money. People simply can’t pay, yet they’re busier than ever. The frenetic pace of life and the demands are issues that have perplexed me for the last 5 years. I see the Star Curriculum as an antidote to this in education. It is a push back to the prevailing voices that say you have to do it perfectly and do it now or do it the way it’s always been done. It’s exactly what I needed to springboard me back into the classroom. It’s pruned everything down to creating community and classroom management for the first month or so. I don’t feel the anxiety of needing to do this or that. Thanks everyone for the inspirations!