School Day

School Day

I was checking out the comments the other day on a You Tube channel I follow. The channel is all about a young family who have moved to North Carolina to homestead. They are rebuilding the existing trailer home on their property, and are attempting to do this debt-free. Ben, the owner, had laid some insulation in the floor incorrectly, and had received quite a bit of mean spirited criticism.

In an attempt to encourage him this comment caught my eye:

“Every day is a school day...don’t beat yourself up.”

Mat Milton 

As I thought about my over thirty years in the classroom it made me realize that literally every day my students were learning something new. I was always teaching them something they didn’t know.

It made me a little jealous of having that opportunity on a daily basis. You see sometimes as we get older we start to think that maybe we already pretty much know most everything we need to know to get along in the life we have chosen. 

But the truth is that there is ALWAYS something new to learn, and we should be open to that learning. As students, making mistakes is part of the learning process. I remember how many dot-to-dot worksheets I messed up until the pattern of number finally clicked in my six year old brain. 

Never attempting in fear of messing up is the real tragedy, not the actual mistake. I like thinking about each day being a brand new opportunity for me to learn something new. 

And like Mat Milton reminds us, if you stumble along the way, “don’t beat yourself up.”