Spring Break is here! My school has a two week March Break instead of a week each in February and April, and I really like it. I have a good lineup for Spring Break planned. A few days at home (with my daughter still at daycare!), a trip to visit family with my daughter while my husband stays home and has some solo time, and finally a meditation retreat for the last few days that I'm really looking forward to. It feels like a good balance of things, and I'm excited to do some projects around the house for the first few days of break. I'm currently at the Verizon store getting my tech in order, which is something I definitely wouldn't have the patience to take on during an ordinary weekend.
I talked to my grade level colleague about the schedule shift, and she was very enthusiastic. We shifted our schedule so all of our core content is wrapped by lunch, and we realized that allows us to do flexible grouping for word study and independent reading conferences across classrooms in the afternoon which has been really nice. Instead of planning for 5 word study groups, I'm planning for 3 and that's so much more manageable.
Sensory breaks and fidgets have also been a hit. Students have been making wise choices about how to use their break time, and I introduced a couple of different fidgets. I have previously resisted fidgets in the classroom because the research is mixed, but I think making a couple of options available has been a net positive. We talked a lot about how to use them as tools rather than toys and we also discussed which fidgets work well for meeting time but not for seat work and which work well for both. The favorites have been a set of silicon worry stones I got from Amazon, and I've noticed that I am using those quite a bit too.
As I'm shifting into break mode, I'm thinking a lot about a book that I'm currently reading, The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel. I'm not Jewish, but I was a Religious Studies major and I love learning about different faith traditions. I'm also interested in practicing my own version of a sabbath, probably on Sundays. I'm only about halfway through the book, but something that is so intriguing is an exploration of time vs. space and the idea that (as I'm understanding it) spirituality unfolds in the realm of time.
This paragraph particularly jumped out to me:
To Rabbi Shimeon eternity was not attained by those who bartered time for space but by those who knew how to fill their time with spirit. To him the great problem was time rather than space; the task was how to convert time into eternity rather than how to fill space with buildings, bridges, and roads; and the solution of the problem lay in study and prayer rather than in geometry and engineering.
This is a big idea, and it has me thinking a lot about implications for practice. I can get very intense and urgent about teaching, and I don't regret my ambition about student learning. At the same time, I do think I can lose the forest for the trees, and the ultimate goal is for us to be in touch with our shared humanity, to build community, and to build self knowledge as we learn. Keeping that in mind means remembering to focus on process more than outcome, something I have learned and forgotten more times than I can count. I'm thinking about a specific interaction I had with a group that was working on drafting their adaptation of a Midas and the Golden Touch. They had varying ideas and a lot of anxiety about how they would "get it done." I tried to convince them to try to relax a bit and let go of the end result so they could get more access to creativity and collaboration, but it was difficult.
Undoubtedly, my mind will wander to teaching over the next couple of weeks. I'm excited to sit with the question of how we can fill our time with spirit and how that might influence my conversations with students, planning, and general orientation toward each day / week / unit / etc.
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