Learning about Learning

I’m grateful for Christmas holiday time with the family!

Resilience and perspective.  Two key attributes for any teacher!

The loss of the Community Liaison Team Active Steps outdoor education provision from our ALPs programme due to funding not being renewed will be a major blow.  Sally Harris and her team have done a fantastic job working with our youngsters in the past year and it will mean a re-think of our programme at the school.  I know that the team have done similar, excellent work throughout East Lothian in the past few years with many different groups of young people and their provision will be sorely missed.  A great shame.

Today’s debt of gratitude goes to all of the inspirational and wise people I’ve met in my life, as well as to all the setbacks and defeats I’ve had. 

Every one has been and excellent opportunity to learn about myself and my direction in life.

I’m grateful that I live in a society  in which I’m able to express my thoughts and opinions, even if other people do not agree with them.

I am grateful for being able to learn from my experiences.  Somebody somewhere once said, “there is no failure, only feedback”.  Very true in my opinion, but not always easy to see.

I’m grateful babies go to sleep…….sometimes, even sometimes at night!! 

I am currently on paternity leave after the birth of our second son, Myles Richard, last Monday.  Thankfully everything went well, albeit 2 weeks late, and we are all now adjusting to life as four!  Sleep currently at a premium.

I happened to read an article about gratitude and how it has positive effects on mental health ie if you can positively identify things in your life you are grateful for then it follows, it would seem, that you are more likely to have a positive mental outlook.  I think this is probably quite an intuitive idea, but although I regard myself as someone with a ‘positive’ outlook I’m not sure I take the time on a regular basis to really think about all the things in my life I’m grateful for. 

So here is where my learning log comes in……

I have been posting less over the past few months which has been due to a combination of factors, work(ironically), family and african drumming commitments.  I have decided therefore to try and keep a sort of gratitude diary as well as continuing with my SQH postings when appropriate.

I’ll try and post every day if possible, detailing the thing I’ve been thinking about on that day.  I figure it is a win/win situation, put myself in a positive mental state and the return to posting regularly to my learning log will hopefully spark further posts as the race to the end of SQH hots up!

 So here goes:

The first one is going to be easy, seeing as I’ve been thinking a lot about it!  Top five currently…

I am grateful for:

The safe arrival of Myles

My family

My wife’s incredible control during her labour(otherwise I might have struggled!!)

Our home and sense of community in the local area

The support of my work colleagues while I’ve been on paternity leave(chocolate biscuits aplenty for everyone next week!)

Let’s see how it goes with the gratitude diary.