Keep the Important the Focus

This morning sipping my coffee and checking out my news feeds I came across the following article on Ruby Bridges, The six year old who defied a mob.  Reading this article and imagining what this little girl and her family had to endure just to attend school was a powerful reminder about why we do what we do as educators and how we need to keep our focus on the important and not get overwhelmed with the urgent.  Education can be a complex, messy, complicated endeavor, that often feels overwhelming as we are confronted with standardized tests scores, government curriculum redesigns, students and families with complex social, emotional and learning profiles.  Tack on a general feeling of negativity towards public education that sees teachers as highly paid baby sitters and it is easy to lose one's passion and purpose.

I have rewritten my thoughts on this article several times and deleted them as I truly have too much to say around it but for me it really instilled a renewed sense of defiance about what I value in education and why I became a teacher.  

This is the sort of article I would have printed out and used the basis of a lesson in my social studies class and really challenged my students to explore what it speaks to them about regarding society, education, our past, where we are at today and where we want to be in the future.  In that spirit I will just leave it here and allow you to read the article if you so choose and decided for yourself what it means to you.