Sunday, March 15, 2020

Tackling Tough Times With Lightness, Laughter, & A Bit of Fun Theory

My Spring Break started this past Friday. Yay!

But, even here at the cusp, it's not been a typical spring break.
  • Spring Break Eve began with an announcement from our governor that schools would be closed for the next two weeks due to COVID-19. 
  • Unprecedented and odd, but actually weirdly okay given our independent school already had the built-in calendar gift of 2 weeks off. In some ways, it aligned wonderfully well.
  • BUT...there's also the possibility it won't, so for the previous week and a half, our Tech & admin teams were busy scurrying together a plan for the possibility of remote learning... all as time ticked along, closing our window of time before break.
  • Plus, I was also running up agains the March 17th deadline to turn in our recertification to be a Maryland Green School. (More on that process in a later post.)
It's kind of been the perfect storm. Add in:
  • For the last 2 weeks, on top of the full tech days, I've had late nights trying to get final details in order for the green school application... and long full weekend days of computing--even yesterday. Even after spring break started, I was still heftily in worker bee mode.
  • My spring break plans are (and have been) dissolving. My family had already decided to cancel our train trip to New York City to visit friends, and another overnight the second weekend had to be canceled too. (Although Amtrak canceled us before we even had a chance to cancel them.) I'm also contemplating making a flight trip into a driving trip... just still not sure on those plans
  • Then there's all the news stories that you just can't get away from: "the virus." It's changing daily, and teachers, by nature, like to have a little more control in life than all of this.
So, I entered Spring Break overtired, still in work mode the first day and a half, and hyped up.

It was here, as I was contemplating this is a strange and unusual time for the world, that I ran across the idea of fun theory--one I'd encountered before, and perhaps that timing was heaven-sent:

We need to take a breath, embrace the lightness and the laughter, and ultimately go with the flow as best as we can. That, in part, is what Spring Break is always about. And just because we may be under a bit of house arrest, we can take advantage of the days, these warm sunny spring days, and the nights that are now lighter because of daylight savings time. Maybe what we need is less news and more comedy. Maybe more books and outside and less social media. Maybe a bit of game playing, movie binging, and approaching it all appreciating the gift of time. What have you been waiting to do? Maybe now's the time to do it.  Maybe the place to start is by watching these, part of the Volkswagen about 10 years ago showing that fun can bring about positive changes:





Quote from https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/randy-pausch-quotes; Videos from https://youtu.be/SByymar3bds, https://youtu.be/qRgWttqFKu8

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