your way to your favorite coffee place. You order your normal drink, sit down at your normal chair. All is right with the world. Then you take your first sip of a horrible-tasting latte. You arise and find yourself screaming, “What the $#$@#$!~!?”
The next thing you know, the barista is in tears. The other adults are looking at you like you’re walking around with a contagious disease of crazy (you are, by the way). Even people who have snapped for their own reasons are disturbed by your outburst. You see all of this and realize it is time to set another goal: find a new coffee place and start the cycle all over.
That’s what goals do. They keep us in a loop. We can’t be free until we achieve the goal. If the goal doesn’t work, we simply change the playing field. It is a form of insanity. Again, we see insanity fairly represented as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
When we set priorities, we don’t get trapped. We go with the flow. Priorities are fluid. People who understand and apply the concept of priorities approach the situation differently. They feel all the same feelings. The difference would be that when they sip the bad cup of coffee, they know it is time to go get a massage, a facial, or just be alone for a few hours. They would return to the priority that sent them in the direction of the coffee shop in the first place.
Set priorities. Teachers do not have the power to make you or your child stupid, yet the manner in which they hold themselves as authority or parent figures can trigger a massive amount of issues. We have to remove all of this “stuff” in order to be effective. We cannot fall into the trap of reacting by making teachers the new targets of childhood traumas that will never be healed through reliving them.
Today, make it your priority to read one page of this book. Flip to a random page. Read the page as many times as you want. Find how that single page sets in motion a variety of great ideas from your mind. Success is when we feel the energy shift out of negativity into either positive or neutral energy.
Track your progress on this change. The more this change becomes a habit, the easier the homework life gets. In essence, this helps us to move out of fear, which is fed by goal setting, into faith, which is nurtured by the priority path. The priority path allows us to see what positives and challenges the day has brought us and to respond to those items as they reveal themselves. This is different than the goal setting path, which feeds into the idea that we know there is trouble ahead. We spend time, effort and energy trying to manage this and find ourselves reacting. This becomes the hamster wheel and we feel like we are always putting out fires.
The priority path allows us to enjoy the fire. We can either put the fire out or use it to make s’mores. We become in control of the fire rather than the fire controlling us.
Homework vs. Busywork
An item you need to watch for from day one of school:
Are the assignments given to my child homework or busywork?
The irony is that people focus too much on grades and too little on organizing the assigned work.
This challenge is compounded when the child has more than one teacher. Teachers fall into various categories:
(a) organized
(b) disorganized
(c) focused
(d) scattered
(e) new to teaching
(f) teaching a long time and
(g) other
These are not necessarily exclusive or logical. For example, it is possible to have a teacher who is (a), (d) and (f). These teachers may be able to organize the work, which is the start of their process. In the classroom they may be scattered, and may have taught for too long to see their weaknesses any more. Homework vs. busywork is simply a symptom of how your child’s teacher’s mind works. This is critical information if, later in the year, you challenge the teacher’s thinking.
Trust your intuition. If it feels like the teachers are assigning too much homework, then they are assigning too much homework. Do not overthink it and become trapped into thinking about how you would teach the class. If it feels like they are not assigning enough homework, then trust that, too.
The best example of this is that children are not being taught basic writing tools, spelling, and math multiplication tables, like when we went to school. I work with some schools where they do not even grade spelling, and with other schools where they somehow manage to teach math without multiplication tables. Without these basic building blocks, every child naturally falls behind.
To keep it simple, ask yourself these basic questions every time you see homework:
Does this assignment help my child grow today in reading, writing, or math?
Does my child already know this material?
Did my child get enough practice this week for reading, writing and math?
Can I connect any of the assignments to my children’s lives inside this house? For example, if they were assigned twenty minutes of reading, can I sit with them and read for twenty minutes? Does the math apply to anything financial in the household this week?
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