To encourage dialogue and reflection about the ways that our own growth and improvement can also benefit others, our question for this week is: What is one thing you can commit to doing to help improve yourself and the lives of others? Improving Oneself and Others (Week of 1/15/23) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
Blake's Guiding Lights
Our Students
Blake's Core Values: Respect, Responsibility, Resourcefulness, Reflection
Our Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
Our Mission: Blake Middle School believes in a living mission statement, based on the concept that our community seeks and respects knowledge, integrity, character, wisdom, and the willingness to adapt to a continually evolving world.
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. - John Dewey
You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow. - John Dewey
I hope that our ‘no homework weekend’ was one that could be embraced and realized by all, as we certainly are back in the flow of school with only a couple of weeks into 2023. We had a mix of rest and activities, with basketball games, watching some football playoffs, and getting ready for Maggie’s return to school on Monday. The #dayofservice blood drive at Blake was a nice way to observe Dr. King and the holiday. Please join me in thanking Cynthia McClelland for her leadership, commitment, and passion and all of the students and staff volunteers as well for this important work. It’s amazing that this is the 9th year of the drive!
An awareness of one’s own emotions, feelings, and relationships with oneself and others is a key factor in development and progress. This ‘message’ is one that I hope we can continue to lean into as we further our thinking, planning, and work with how we can help our students be prepared for both the present and the future (see some responses below from last week’s question). And, in turn, hopefully our individual and collective blueprints will continue to evolve and grow to support ourselves and others.
Goal Check
From The Character Lab
James Gross, a professor of psychology and expert on emotion regulation at Stanford University, talked to us about what parents can do to help teenagers with self-control.
As parents, we can see what’s going on in their lives from a place of clarity. That perspective can be really helpful. For instance, on their own, without you, your son or daughter may not do so well at finding the balance between having fun with their friends, on the one hand, versus studying and being productive on the other.
Don’t get into antagonistic interactions right after school…Don’t try to talk about homework or whatever else you know should get done when your kid is telling you how their day went…Do make yourself available…An open door tells them I can be interrupted.
As a parent, you want to build routines for talking with your kids about what matters to them and to you.
There’s No Such Thing as a Bad Emotion
by Marc Brackett and Co-authored with Robin Stern in Medium
No doubt people enjoy feeling happy — and people also prefer to be around other happy people. But believing we need to be happy all of the time is misguided. Life, including our relationships and jobs, is complex and filled with a range of emotions that are not only unavoidable, but add to the texture of our lives.
From an emotional intelligence perspective, all emotions are information. They are cues, signals — telling us to approach or avoid, to stay or to go.
Emotions also provide a lens through which we interpret information…It is the range of emotions that we experience — not any specific one, that opens our eyes and encourages us to grow, learn, and become catalysts for change.
It’s what we do with our emotions that really matters. Aristotle got it right when he said, “Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”
What is your life's blueprint? | Martin Luther King Jr: An extraordinary life
Six months before he was assassinated, King spoke to a group of students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia on October 26, 1967.
I want to ask you a question, and that is: What is your life’s blueprint?
Number one in your life’s blueprint, should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your worth and your own somebodiness. Don’t allow anybody to make you fell that you’re nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.
Secondly, in your life’s blueprint you must have as the basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor. You’re going to be deciding as the days, as the years unfold what you will do in life — what your life’s work will be. Set out to do it well.
Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: What skills do we need to be prepared for the future?
- How to deal with tough situations
- Resilience
- We need to be able to do taxes and manage money correctly. It’s going to be a rude awakening for us in the real world if we can’t do taxes.
- We need to be kind to others around us.
- Learning skills
- We need to focus on our speaking and listening skills, ethical use of technology, and foundational reading and writing.
- Adaptation
- Education
- Teach us what to put on resumes so we can actually get jobs.
- We need to be thoughtful about our environment when we throw this out. This comes to recycling and throwing things in the trash.
- Ingenuity!
- I don't know
- We need to have cooperation and a will to not annoy others.
- We need to know how to work out your mistakes and learn from them over and over.
** These words are ones I come back to and share every year…
“So even though we face difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.”
“Find a voice in a whisper.”
“There is no such thing as separate but equal. Separation, segregation, inevitably makes for inequality.”
"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."
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Take care.
Nat