Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Are Habits forming?



Every day since the challenge began, I eagerly open the website to see what the new post contains. This morning was no different! I had just finished my morning workout and was cooling down with my mega water and eagerly opened the newest post.  I read through the normal announcements and then read the inspirational quote of the day. Wow! This is a great quote and really spoke to my life and my class.

See we just had a class meeting on forming the habit of kindness. We are in the home stretch of fourth grade and as many of my fellow fourth-grade teachers know, classroom drama begins a steady incline for the remainder of the year.  These kids are part child and part pre-teen. It is a crazy juxtaposition of emotions, maturity level, and hormones. Every day presents a new challenge, a new emotion and a new piece of drama.  The last few days of February proved to have an epic amount of girl and boy drama.  What is a teacher to do?  I recruited our counselor and we sat down with the kids.  The counselor discussed the prevalence of their drama, that no one is perfect and moving forward we would form a new habit.  She told them that they currently have a habit of picking at each other ( as most families do) but we were going to change that habit to one of kindness.  21 days is our goal, 21 days to form a new habit, 21 days to choose kindness over negativity.  We are on day three of our new habit and I can say that we are well on our way to forming a new habit. As I have told them since our first day of school, we should all choose kindness.

In my personal life, maintaining habits is so very important.  If you read yesterday's post, you know that working out is important to me.  I established that habit years ago...it was tough at first but I stuck with it and now I can't do without my daily exercise fix.  Recently, I decided to give up sugar. The first few days were miserable.  For me, sugar is such a hard habit to break.  I LOVE candy, not chocolate so much, but the sweet sugary sticky candy. Give me a Swedish fish over a Hershey's any day. We still had leftover Christmas candy and I have teenagers who have candy everywhere.  It was a test to my willpower and resolve to walk by that candy every day.  But I did it, I have gone eight weeks without candy.  Well....I have had a few bites of candy here and there but not one bite of the good sugary candy.  I know I can't! One bit and I am back in the candy wormhole. 

I guess I am forming a new habit with my daily blog writing.  So far, I have found that I love writing even more than I did before.  I know that when inspiration wears off, the habit of writing will kick in.





2 comments:

  1. So true about habits. I have yet to master the workout habit like you, that's awesome!

    ReplyDelete
  2. We are experiencing much the same rise in drama in 6th grade. I love this perspective: teach them about how habits works and charge them with developing a new, more positive habit. You are brilliant.

    ReplyDelete

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