New Year Resolutions

"Celebrate what you want to see more of."

-Tom Peters

This time of year, it isn't hard to find articles about New Year Resolutions and how we should come up with them, keep them, and then ultimately abandon them. I love the idea of starting a year fresh with lofty goals. On January 1st, everything seems possible. My wife and I always joke that we start every year saying it is going to be the best year ever because of all of the goals we lay out for the coming year, but then we invariably get about 30 minutes into the thing before we end up doing the familiar dance of simply trying to survive 24 hours at a time for 12 straight months. I'm sure that if we really reflected, we would find that we actually did accomplish some of those goals, but we were too stressed out and exhausted to realize it.

Normally, I'm not one to brag on myself, but in my lifetime, I have actually kept my New Year Resolution for an entire year on three separate occasions. Two of those were consecutive years and the same resolution, so maybe that doesn't count as two, but I'm the one keeping score here, so I say it is two. In 2005 and 2006, my New Year Resolution was simply "Don't die." Now, on the surface that may seem like cheating, but those happen to be the two years that I spanned by 12 month tour in Iraq, so it was harder to keep that particular resolution those two years than is typically the case. The other came a few years later when I resolved to stop drinking regular soda. This came after the emergence of calorie counting apps when I realized the 32oz Polar Pop Mt Dews I was drinking every day amounted to eating about a dozen donuts. I actually did really well on that one and have very rarely drank anything other than diet soda since then.

The point is that I don't think New Year Resolutions need to be huge, lofty goals to transform our lives in a single swoop. We just need to focus on one small thing. I encourage all of you to come up with a teacher resolution for the second semester, but instead of focusing on adding something new, look back on something that you are really proud of from the first semester and simply try to do it a little more.

My principal resolution is to spend more time in classrooms. My favorite moments from first semester were not spent in my office or in a meeting; they were spent in your classrooms watching you do the amazing things you do. My goal is to make myself do it more often and for greater periods of time because I found that when I was grounded in the work you were doing, the decisions I make in my office seemed way easier because I was focused on our purpose here.

Here is to another great semester that hopefully has very few snow days and several three-day weekends in May!

PS- I'd love to hear your teacher resolutions in the comment section.