Tag: Love

Keep your head up high – I know you are amazing!

Keep your head up high when everyone else is losing there. Comment below what this phrase means to you. Be proud in what you are doing and enjoy your minor successes.

Keep Your Head Up High – You are awesome!

In teaching, you will find some who seem to make it their life’s work to make everyone below them feel unappreciated . Somewhere along the way, they entered the rat race to get to the top. I, on the other hand, didn’t want to lead, I just kind of floated to the top due to years of teaching experience. The skill is to remember that most of their anger and disappointment probably is coming from a part of their life you are blissfully unaware of. It could be a financial crisis, romantic disaster or an on-coming mental breakdown. The chances that you are their real focus is small.

Keep your head up high – What you do and teach really matters on a daily basis.

Teaching fashions regularly change. They switch from student self discovery to talk and chalk, to topic work, to individual subjects and back again. If you find the system that works for you, then hold onto it. Keep your head up high and do your best. I have discovered there is no such thing as a perfect educational system. The educational system is simply a reflection of society. The Japanese have a hard working culture, so the intensive school reflects it. The British don’t know if they are coming or going, and guess what, they have an educational system to match. I know of long term teachers who have never changed their teaching approach been the leading edge three or four times in their career.

Accept the things you can’t change – you can only do so much.

The British invest less and less into education, have buildings in a state of disrepair and a staffing crisis. The education system is suffering and the teachers are expected to fill the gaps. Headteachers work as the school plumbers and gardeners, and there is huge levels of stress all around. This is where people say and do negative things. They do it unthinkingly and you should take their anger in your stride. As the famous poem says. Listen to the dull and ignorant, they to have their story. However avoid aggressive and loud people, they are a vexation to the spirit. What was true 100 years ago is still true today…

A poem you need to listen to.

You can only create the smallest microcosm of calm and security in your own classroom. Keep your head up high as you are possibly the only adult the children seen in the day who actually has confidence in what the kid is achieving. There are desperately sad stories of children in every classroom. The scale of poverty on the UK is breathtaking. A country which once controlled a quarter of the world’s landmass and most of the seas has been reduced to not being able to prevent poverty and share wealth.

Keep your head up high – the worst is yet to come!

It will become worse as Brexit bites and the Conservatives, now with a freer hand than ever, cuts public spending. The perfect place for a school would be on a bridge. I’ve noticed there is no limit to the levels of funding for crazy ideas. Imagine a school stretching from Ireland to Scotland or perhaps for a simpler primary school, just build it directly over the Thames or between Southampton and the Isle of Wight.

Give yourself a much needed pep talk today!

Be proud of yourself – you are ama

In addition to being proud of your school achievements, be proud of who you are. Keep your head up high when you tell people you are a teacher. Without teachers, there would be no doctors, engineers or scientists. You will probably contribute to someone’s great discovery further down their career track. At the same time, I really do recommend you look at developing a passive, second income so when you can take class life no more, you have a nice income elsewhere.

I have been motivated to do this after reading a scary book on city air pollution. I realise I should be trying to move out of Bucharest and into the countryside. However, unlike in Britain, where the rich live in the countryside, it is the opposite case in Romania. So I need to first find a way to survive on my ecological based farm.

Take joy in your plans and the wonderful world around you.

Every year my farm has improved in terms of conditions for wildlife. Today I went out and discovered 20 sparrows roosting in the tree next to my kitchen. I’ve discovered that as birds pass by, they now stop and feed here in ever growing numbers. Sparrows are new to me. Until now, I’ve only had wonderful, vibrant coloured great tits and blue tits.

In the same way, at school, students who visit our school stay on. I teach my children that they must keep their heads up and simply believe in themselves. They then develop skills faster and feel the positive feedbacks of learning – Sucess – and learning more.

Keep your spirits up with a happiness journal.

If you are having difficulty in keeping your spirits up and self-confidence booming like mine, then there is a simple solution. Buy the prettiest looking journal you can find. Every day for 1 month write down the following things. 3 things you are grateful for, one good deed you have actively done, one reconnection you have made in your social network (the 5 minute stroke) where you have written to long forgotten friend or someone you don’t normally praise and one piece of active exercise. After a week you will really feel the difference. You will feel happier, stronger and a lot more appreciated. I do it every so often and I have always been well rewarded for my efforts.

Accept you can only change in a positive place, willing to allow you to change.

If you live or work in a completely negative environment, move on – it helps you to Keep your head up high. If you find you are always in negative relationships or have a terrible boss then look inside. The chances are you are bringing the negative cloud with you. It is here you need to focus for your own mental wellbeing. Develop a more positive approach to what you do and be grateful for all you have and it will become easier over time.

Finally, you need to keep your head up high, and remember not to wait for the storm to pass. Instead you need to learn how to dance in the rain and discover opportunities for your positivity to shine through. Life will always throw you unexpected turns. Your job is to turn lemons into lemonade, and make use of every chance you have to grow and develop into the best version of you that you can be. Smile, have a lovely day and be great. I know that you already are.

Forgive And Forget – A key classroom skill

Everyone says to forgive and forget. Comment below with examples about when you forgave and forgot in the classroom. Forgiving simply let’s you lose the negative, and replace it with some more positive.

Forgive and forget and move on with your life journey.

Everyone screws up. Not all the time (in general) but sometimes. These screw ups tend to increase when we are under pressure or trying to pass a deadline. As a headteacher, the unpopular role is to track down scewups and expose them. Followed by resolving them and after making sure the person recognises the issues and will not repeat them, forgive them.

My own career is littered with disasters others have bestowed on me. My first job gave me a wonderfully overpaid contract, then decided I cost too much and made my life hell so I’d leave. As an NQT, it is not hard for a perverse management to fail every lesson somehow.

Other school have insisted I created a company for their tax reasons. When i left, i left with a company which has proven impossible to shut down. I could go on all day… but you get the gist.

Forgiveness in the classroom let’s everyone move forward together.

However, in the classroom, all is totally different. Every day, every kid comes in on a fresh sheet. I put grudges and problems to one side. If the kid decides he or she will take a better tack in class, they are instantly rewarded with praise. Forgiving and forgetting is a part of the school ethos. It is a key lesson all children need to learn.

Children can journal their feelings of upset and how they will resolve the issue and then simply write they forgive that person. The students must learn that everyone, in all walks of life, make mistakes. Everyone needs and deserves forgiveness.

The weird thing they need to learn is a grudge is often very one-sided. Their opponent has probably long forgotten the argument, or is completely and blissfully unaware they had done anything wrong in the first place. The worry doesn’t chew up their soul and insides. Stop tormenting your own soul. Forgive. The best art is you never need if you don’t to..

Forgive And Forget – A key classroom skill you can use and practice daily in the classroom.

We do a daily Jamie ‘Peace out’ in our classroom. It is a wonderful daily 5 to 15 minute journey into mindfulness. She guides the class and helps them sort out their emotions. As she says, all emotions are good, all long as you are watching them from the outside. You need to let go of things which bother you.

Let things go – relax and be happy.

Forgiveness can be over small things or mind numbingly big things. Such as who is responsible for modern climate change? The parents? The grandparents? If they had taken real action earlier, then we would be on a better, safer and environmentally kinder track. Should you blame them? Most of us were wildly ignorant of the forecasts and issues when we were young. The curious part being, regardless of who is to blame, being angry now won’t change the past. Forgiving and moving on together is the only solution.

Parents need to model daily how they accept and resolve mistakes.

Parents need to also actively show their kids forgiveness and model how to .Forgive And Forget. My son smashed every screen of my kindles by mistake. The Kindld Fires seem more unbreakable. But I have always forgiven him. After all, being angry does not bring back a broken screen. And speaking of broken screens, his wrap sheet is very long… 2 lap tops and a desktop to boot.

By teaching forgiveness to my staff, I actively encourage creativity. I was taught one simple thing in life, if you are not failing and screwing up, you are not testing your personal boundaries of achievement or those of your class. Teachers should be allowed a 10 to 25% annual idea failure rate. More than this, and they have not put enough effort into their plan and built in fail-safes. Less than that, and the kids are in a rut, not exploring their academic limits.

Forgive And Forget – A key classroom skill

Stop Beating Youself Up For Past Failings.

Forgiveness should also be applied to oneself. We are our greatest critics. We are the ones who keep score of all our failings, disasters and mishaps. Did you know regret at not doing something is bigger than trying and failing. You also need to (as I frequently have to remind myself) need to remember that all those failings in your life are well spread apart with lots of goodness inbetween. Our brain likes to concertina our failings into one huge lump. Then it looks and feels like you are complete failure. The truth is completely opposite.

Forgiving yourself is the path to a happier future. Mistakes happen. I believe 99% of the problems in your life were not willfully done, they just happened. You need to learn from these mistakes, as I am sure you have and move on.

Regret of the undone is harder to bear than trying and failing. With the done comes experience of how to be better next time.

Likewise stop beating yourself up for things you didn’t do. I often wonder what other versions of my life would have been like. Marrying my first live from college, buying properties just before the boom, throwing caution to the wind and buying Bitcoins early etc. But none of these paths would have led me to you or you to me. I like my path. Every other path would have been different, but I don’t know if it would have been better.

You also need to forgive others. Especially if the wrongs they did happened before you. My youngest brother went down a very dark, alcohol and drug fuelled path. We all expected him dead before 30. But then he met the right woman and found his true path. She forgave his earlier excesses on the understanding they were in the past. Not present. You can do then same.

Forgive And Forget – A key classroom skill which starts with you forgiving yourself.

The first act of forgiveness is to write a letter saying you forgive them or an earlier version of yourself. You don’t need to ever send it if you don’t want to or can’t (such as forgiving a dead person( but you will feel the forgiveness unwrapping the pain and sorrow which is currently suffocating your entire being.

Do it today and you will see the difference immediately. Have a great day. As they say. Every story has a happy ending. If it doesn’t, it just means the story has yet to end.