Educators Archives

Eight Dimensions of Wellness

Physical wellness is all about your body. Your physical wellness depends on eating healthy food, getting enough sleep, and exercising.

Emotional wellness is about your feelings, attitude about life, and having support systems to get you through personal or professional challenges. Your mind is a terrible thing to neglect.

Intellectual wellness is about your brain and learning new knowledge. Many people don’t realize that intellectual wellness is also a priority. Educators use their intellectual power throughout a school day. Therefore, you need a healthy brain to make crucial decisions and shifts daily. Also, using your intellectual power requires learning new skills, teaching and learning strategies, or the latest research.

Social wellness means you have positive and supportive relationships in your life. Both professionally and personally, your relationships can be a part of a robust support system.

Spiritual wellness focuses on your soul, inner self, and faith. Whether one is religious or not, we all have a spiritual side. Also, spiritual wellness can include meditation to renew ourselves and have inner peace.

Environmental wellness is about our living conditions on earth. Living and working conditions affect our health. Whether at home or work, we want to live free of harmful chemicals and toxins.

Occupational wellness refers to our career, job, and workplace. Are you happy about your professional path? Is your workplace physically, emotionally, socially, or environmentally healthy?

Financial Wellness – If the money is funny, your financial health can harm your overall wellness. Worrying about money, savings, or bills is a health hazard. Financial wellness eases many burdens.

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How well are you? Your wellness is your responsibility.

Focus on Your Wellness

How will you answer the question, “How well are you?” Use these eight principles of wellness to reflect and then respond. As you focus on your wellness, remember these seven principles:

Wellness is holistic

The self is the only true healer

Wellness is your responsibility

Positivity is empowerment. Negativity strips you of power and control.

Wellness is an active process. Don’t wait for good health to come to you!

Wellness is outcome oriented

Prevention eliminates the need for treatment.

Wellness is a Personal Responsibility

Making changes to focus on your wellness requires setting firm foundations. The first foundation is hope. Believe you can, and then set goals. Wellness is a personal responsibility, so take action toward your goals. It would help if you had support on your journey. Lean on others for encouragement. Advocate for yourself by communicating your needs. Get good information, then make decisions. Lastly, find meaning and purpose in your life. Identify what matters most to you.

Educators, take control of your wellness. Many say they are tired of hearing the term self-care; however, we cannot depend on school districts to provide needed support. So, we must understand our responsibilities when it comes to our well-being. Remember, wellness is an active process. Don’t wait for good health to come to you!

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Task of the Educators

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.” by C.S. Lewis.

Samuel Durr writes this guest post. He was given the quote by C.S. Lewis to interpret and give his perspective. Durr is a special education teacher who has been teaching in Chicago for 15 years. He has authored one published book, a few novels, and a barrage of short stories.

The phrase, irrigate deserts, is interesting in this famous C.S Lewis quote. The author probably means educators should encourage enthusiasm and curiosity, which is a good rule. Still, for me, the desert imagery has a different, probably unintended, possible tangential, effect. Since I carry my own associations and personal experience like an over-stuffed backpack, I will write about what questions it raises for me. Is education, are classrooms, are students, deserts? A desert is a resourceless, brutal environment where nothing flourishes, and everything has protective spines and spikes.

Education is a Desert

The quote by C.S. Lewis offers an interesting perspective about the task of the modern educator.

In short. Yes. Education has become a desert. The need for a sea change is obvious to just about everyone. Recently, five large schools in Baltimore, Maryland, four of which were high schools, were found not to have a single student reading at grade level. Is Baltimore a city of fools? No, and so it’s clear that something is wrong, and I can’t help but wonder if maybe general education has become too available.

The hard truth is that when anything is generalized, in fact mandatory, it becomes worthless and sometimes even loathed. Ask any teacher tasked to hand out free breakfast. Proportionally, far more of it ends up in the trash than in the mouths of those it intended to help. Students even complain about free breakfast as they drop it into the can. In other words, I’m not so sure we have a problem with how we educate.

Force to Educate

Maybe, we have an issue with who we force to educate? If a family honestly doesn’t want to send their kid to school, why should they, and why do some schools have to take every student? This is a little ridiculous under a microscope. It has turned many public schools, unfortunately, into minimum security prisons.

Luckily, I have a solution. Picture, for a moment, if public schools could be more selective about which students they take? Just slightly. I’ve worked at four different schools over my fifteen-year career, and I can say without flinching each would have benefitted profoundly from booting ten kids, almost all for severe behavioral reasons. It’s easy to get all squirmy about the idea of leaving children behind.

Good Intentions

Still, perhaps it should be considered that despite good intentions and hard work, no teacher, counselor, priest, or coach can right the worst of the worst. Isn’t that nature? Some of the brood doesn’t make it for reasons beyond the control. With enough concentration, or maybe delusion, it’s possible to imagine an unnatural world in which every child becomes successful, but in such a world, the bar for success would be significantly raised. And if it were, we would still have students who didn’t “make it.”

The point is that prioritizing students based on their sociability or intelligence is not evil, it’s realistic. It’s time to fully consider that organizing institutions around rotten principals leave us with rotten schools. Ten students, out of five hundred, give or take, isn’t very many but would change the overall tone. Similarly, imagine if a school had the ability to boot a kid because of parent harassment? Only in the most extreme cases, of course, but if schools simply had the authority, however weak, imagine the change.

Education as a Status Symbol

Consider also, if the government didn’t take money out of taxes to pay for public education but instead invited parents to pay out of pocket? If education became a status symbol, as it is to many parents already, they would be willing to spend money to send their children to better schools, and they wouldn’t trash their neighborhood schools and teachers. Competition can be healthy if it’s refereed.

Problematic Institution

There are shining lights in every classroom, even in the worst public schools: brilliant students, self-sacrificing teachers, thought-provoking lessons, and dedicated staff. I don’t want to degrade education. There are many positives, and some of the best humans we have are teachers. Still, this institution has far too many problems, and the positives of change are worthy of the risks. It’s sad to say, anyone who’s been in a public school lately can attest to the lack of resources, brutal environment, ineffective teaching, poor social behavior, disorganized, stupid factories they have become. The point is, we can do much, much better. C.S. Lewis uses the term desert, and it works, it’s effective, but I wish it weren’t.

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Category Archives: Educators

Educators, How Well are You?