Amy’s Reflections

How do you measure success? How do you reflect on a decade? The week between Christmas and New Years is always a time when you look back on past successes and failures and think forward to setting goals for the future. Lately, I have found myself at an odd crossroad. I have always been a very goal oriented person and thrive when I have goals to work towards whether they are personal wellness, fitness, travel, education and/or work related. Since defending my dissertation on October 1, I have struggled to figure out what exactly my next goal is. I have found myself over the past few months struggle to commit to anything and everything whether it be an outing with friends, doing a Crossfit competition, travel plans, future career plans, etc. So I decided this week to take some time to try and just be with a simple to-do list where my goal has been to finish one book (I am still working on this), one small task everyday on my Google Keep list, spend as much time with Moe as possible, pl...

We have been spending a lot of time with some of our new freshmen friends and I have been reflecting a lot on those discussions and some of the challenges many of them face with trying to define who they are as people and to find their interests and passions.  As we have worked toward developing a capstone project and also moving towards restorative discipline approaches (more to come on this in later posts),  I wanted to share the below  lesson  plan  idea (s) and materials as a thought for a meaningful mini- lesson  for students as we end the decade and begin a new one after the holiday break. Perhaps as an opportunity to help students reflect on their growth and time to think about how they want to define 2020 (or even the decade ahead of them and putting this last one behind them in some cases). I also know we often have trouble keeping our students focused in the final few days before the break too...I still remember those struggles.  ...