Live and Learn New Mexico!

My last post detailed my horrific return to teaching after years of not teaching. After that incident, I decided to cash in my educational retirement money to make ends meet. But it would take months to process and in the meantime, I still needed to make a little money. Even when the retirement money came in, it wasn't much, so I would need to keep some kind of part-time work.  I didn't care what kind of work I did. It didn't have to be anything that reflected my level of education or administrative experience. Work is work, I thought.  One day, I walked into a hotel in Moriarty and asked about front desk positions. I had been a desk clerk before at a hotel in Los Alamos a long long time ago. No, the manager said, they didn't have those positions but they had one "very part-time laundry" opening. It would be weekends, maybe 16-20 hours total.  That sounded perfect! My son worked at the local laundromat and I knew what kind of work that entailed. I was in

So I thought, when I found that I was going to have to go back to work and a job immediately presented itself, that it was meant to be. I had been blogging about mindfulness in the classroom and suddenly, the opportunity to return to teaching in the public schools, after decades of not, came along.The timing was just too perfect and I'm a sucker for woo woo stuff like fate and destiny and spirit. I thought I was being called to help kids cope better and learn. I thought I was going to save the world! I was so smart! I was going to create a mindful classroom just by going in and telling everyone to be kind to each other.  Two days after I started, I began to realize that I was there to learn a lesson of some sort and it wasn't going to be pretty. And that is indeed what happened. One day, despite trying to build my defenses against such an occurrence, a student got in my face and screamed at me that I couldn't touch him. I don't know what happened. I snapped and s

It's no secret that bullying is a problem, not only in school with our kids but also in life in general. People can be pretty mean. I'm sure most of us have been the victim of a bully or have seen bullying happen to others. We study bullying and report its different variations (physical, verbal, mental) and the effects it has on victims, and it seems like the conversation always centers on how to react to bullying. There isn't much talk about how to prevent it in the first place. According to the Huffington Post (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/franklin-schargel/bullying-what-schools-par_b_4103901.html), schools should do the following, and more, in order to deal with bullying: reduce unsupervised time in the school day better monitor places where bullying happens train teachers to spot and handle incidents encourage all to report bullying when they see it establish a procedure to investigate reports of bullying These are all well and good but is that really the wa

Animals provide companionship, help us deal with life in general, and help us heal. It only seems natural to think about animals and the mutually beneficial relationships we can share with them. As I was researching a story about horse vaulting last month, I asked Facebook friends and followers if they had stories to tell about animals in their lives. One friend, who took care of his father before he passed, told me that he trained his dog Ruby to "check on Dad". When something was wrong, she would bark. This is an example of a dog supporting the son but I'm sure she was also comfort and love to Dad as well. I'm convinced my own dog Joey is an empath. I am always interested to see who he will sit by when people are in the house and having a conversation. Often it is a visitor he doesn't really know. I think he sits by the person he senses needs a friendly spirit by their side. He doesn't bug them at all, just sits quietly. They often reach dow

(This is the second post in a series about mindfulness in the classroom. In the first post, we talked about how incorporating mindfulness practices into the school day can help our kids deal with an ever-anxious world. That post can be found at  http://liveandlearnnm.blogspot.com/2018/04/being-mindful-in-classroom.html.) In today's modern, high-tech world, we are watching our kids becoming more and more stressed out about life in general, and we are realizing that it is affecting their overall health. Our children dread going to school and it breaks our hearts. Learning should be a natural, enjoyable endeavor, not a stressful one. It shouldn't be about standardized tests, getting into college and later getting the really good job that we all know college doesn't guarantee. We don't want them to feel as anxious about school as many of us did. I was anxious in kindergarten! I'm in my fifties now and only recently became aware of the concept of mindfulness. I'v

Let's face it, these days we live in fear. We are an anxious lot. Our kids are growing up afraid of all the bad things that could happen in their lives, to the point that many are afraid of going to school. I never imagined a world where this could be so but it is. What do we do about it? We could strengthen our defenses against violence that might enter the classroom. We could install security equipment, train school personnel, ask military vets to maintain a presence. Or we could work toward a more peaceful solution, one that isn't difficult either. Let's put mindfulness in the classroom. Practicing mindfulness builds bonds and creates a feeling of connectedness. Simply put, it is paying attention to ourselves, others, and the world around us. We are all part of this planet and have challenges to overcome. Mindfulness is based on simple concepts, according to Calm Classroom (https://calmclassroom.com): Self awareness: if we understand how our emotions and though

I've been doing a lot of thinking and learning in the last many weeks, still reeling from the Florida school massacre, where 17 people lost their lives far too early. Of course, as it always does, the conversation focused on guns, which led to the second amendment and on to incredibly angry arguments on social media and everywhere else. I tried to open up a non-political discussion about the issue of so many innocent lives lost to violence but it is impossible, I found, to keep a discussion about guns either a discussion or non-political. A lot of people became rude and defensive. Too many wrote angry and obnoxious comments. Instead of presenting arguments, they were simply calling each other names, and really bad ones at that. I had to delete my final post on the subject from Facebook because of the unreasonable anger. It was appalling how people talk to each other, just because they have a differing opinion. Respect each other, people! We're all on this planet together.

I am a fan of the older dog. I love puppies, I do, but I'm not getting any younger and as I age, my appreciation for older dogs has grown. Three of the four dogs I've been living with for years now are senior dogs. As I've mellowed, they've mellowed. All of the habits that were annoying when they were little are now endearing, such as Buster's hound dog bark that can make you jump right out of your skin if he sneaks up behind you and lets it go. Where once he ran out to chase anything in the back yard, he now ambles down the ramp and moseys on out into the yard to sniff around a little and do his business. He is deliriously happy, though, and once in a while, he just feels like running and taking a flying leap up onto the ramp. There isn't much I can do to stop him so I just close my eyes and pray he doesn't break a leg. He hasn't yet. There are some old dog habits I could do without, like the puddles of drool left on the furniture and the sometime