With 67 more days in 2023, I feel a strong call to be more intentional with the time I have both introspectively and in action as I integrate what I have learned and discovered this year in this wildly wonderful classroom of life.
Yesterday I did some early research about belonging in the classroom as a part of my 100 Days of Belonging project. Since I currently work in a school and spend 21 hours a week in classrooms and have a deep caring for the students I serve, this feels exceptionally important.
Unlike many of my peers at the school, I don’t have the pre-Covid/post-Covid experience to longingly look back towards.
Instead, my focus and my independently operated “course of study” and assignment from Harvey Milk – even though he has been gone from the planet for years – is to work from the inside to discover as much as I can about belonging from my experiences with these students.
It’s kind of like yesterday, when I had a huge a-ha about my body and belonging in my body and realizing the significance of shoes in my overall life experience.
More than one of the students I work with show up at school declaring they want to be at home. “I want to go home,” they say. “They want to go home?” says my curiosity.
Instead of what some of my peers do – marginalize the student’s spoken desire – I do some research to see what it means most often when students make such proclamations.
When students say they want to go “home” it is evidence of being overwhelmed, perhaps a bit of languishing – maybe not being engaged…here we are stepping even more clearly into belonging territory.
As I continue to focus on my self-belonging, I am challenging myself to see where my exploration of self-belonging will help me reach out to students differently.
On Monday at the end of day, I linked arms with a student who was going through a rough time emotionally mostly because she felt alone and unheard in the classroom. I created a space for us to be together and for her to be heard, to know she was safe saying whatever she needed to say with an adult who would listen, consciously, to what she felt was missing that lead to her upset.
I went home feeling grateful for that connection and looking forward to returning to the workplace as more than just a place to do my seven hours and get back to my “real work” as a creative entrepreneur.
This week has been rich with a-ha’s. I look forward to seeing what’s next.
What has been your biggest a-ha this week?
Julie JordanScott is a Creative Life Coach, an award-winning storyteller, actor and poet whose photos and mixed media art graces the walls of collectors across the United States. Her writing has appeared on the New York Times Best Sellers List, the Amazon best sellers list and on American Greetings Holiday cards (and other greeting cards). She currently lives in a manse in Sussex, NJ, where she has recently finished her most recent book project, hugging trees daily and enjoys having random inspirational conversations with strangers.
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