The scene opens to a hand shuffling a deck of cards and the voice of narrator who asks, “What color are the hearts?” Easy question right? Hearts are red. As the dealer continues to shuffle the deck, the voice asks, “What color are the spades?” Again you might think that’s easy too — spades are black just like the clubs. And the video starts to slow, so each individual card is finally visible for 10 seconds, and something doesn’t look right, and as it slows down even more the audience’s eyes squint, scrunch, and their minds spin, “What???” and sputter “Wait! The clubs are red? And hearts, the hearts are BLACK! How can this be? Isn’t this a deck of cards?”
That was a movie to teach a classroom of college students about paradigms, but this may just be how you’ve been feeling in these last two quarters of 2020. Doesn’t it seem possible that a deck of cards created in April 2020 A.D. would have black hearts and diamonds, and red clubs and spades? The world just seems off.
Overnight, in some places literally,
* Classrooms of students silenced as children stayed home with an increased amount of screen time,
* Teachers became students themselves in programs such as navigating google classroom, Adobe connect or Zoom,
* Administrators and Board of Education members turned into IT or technology gurus
all so that they could continue serving their educating children could continue in homes that didn’t have internet access.
Not much time to breathe, but that is exactly what we need to do.
This fall will continue new things and new methods of teaching, and maybe you have studied and feel more confident, but no matter what, we need to have self-control so that we are able to identify the change, and approach our new environment, our new challenges with sound mind and the skills that we have.
I have created the resource “Self-Control:Foundational piece of Peace-Filled Classrooms”. Click here to receive your copy today.
With the ability to choose Self-Control even black hearts and red spades will be okay.
