If you know me, you know I love a good education analogy. In fact, I recently told a colleague, I was having a difficult time explaining a work situation, because I couldn’t think of an appropriate analogy.
The flip side of this is that I often see an education connection in the “regular” non-education elements of my life. Here’s a recent example:
Two months ago I ordered some outdoor furniture and had it delivered. When I placed the order, I had the option to pay extra to have the delivery service unpack the furniture and remove the boxes. I seriously considered it because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the boxes. However, I wanted to save the money and figured I was resourceful enough to figure it out.
On delivery day, they put four VERY large boxes in my garage. I unpacked the boxes and moved the furniture to the back porch. But then I was left with these huge boxes that not only wouldn’t fit in my recycling bin, they wouldn’t even fit in my car to take somewhere. What was I going to do with them?
Then my neighbor said to me, “You can cut them up into smaller pieces and slowly recycle them” – and that was my solution as well as my education connection.
What do we do when faced with a task that seems too large to handle? We break it down into manageable pieces.
What do we do with new initiatives, new textbooks, new standards? We break them down into manageable pieces.
What do we do when we have too many demands, too many things on our to do lists? We break them down into manageable pieces.
I often want to deal with the “whole box” all at once, but that’s not always possible.
I need to remind myself that it’s often best to take things one step at a time. This allows me to not get overwhelmed and to better handle any situation I’m faced with – professional and personal. Remembering this also helps me as I coach other teachers and coaches.
I hope that you are able to take one small step in a direction that you want to go. You can do it – break those large tasks into smaller pieces!
PS – I also thought about finding someone who could use the large boxes as they were, but that didn’t happen 🙂
Reflections of an Instructional Coach 