My New Year’s Wish

Hi all.  It’s Amy K, from Renee’s office at SAMS.  It’s also me in that picture baking with my daughter on my back.  When my husband showed me this picture he took of my youngest and I baking over winter break, it reminded me of parenting advice my minister offered when I was pregnant with our middle child.  She told me the only parenting advice I’d ever need was to “be the person you want your kids to grow up to be”.  Simple enough, yet what a challenge.  I couldn’t help but see this picture as a metaphor and wonder how differently or similarly would I behave if Callie was always on my back, looking over my shoulder, hearing every word I said.

This wasn’t just good parenting advice, it was also good teacher advice.  

Be the learner you want your students to be.

Be the musician you want your students to be.

Be the champion for justice as you want your students to be.  

As the new year gets under way, my wish for the grown-ups in our SAMS community is to have the courage, commitment, and awareness to be the people we want our kids to grow up to be.  We’ll need to rely on each other, as well as our senses of humor, to pull this off.   Our kids will continue to do things like wait until the night before a project is due to get started on it.  Some of them might cry hard over a B+ even though you’ve never expected all As.  They are going to say things they do not mean and try on attitudes that are anything but appealing.  But they are also going to create beautiful artwork in art class, make connections between their current world and the past in Social Studies, and solve complicated algebra problems in math class.  In fact, they are going to shine in all sorts of classrooms.  And while they are stretching their minds with all this learning, we must stretch ourselves to be vigilant in our learning too.  May 2017 be our best yet.  Our kids deserve it.

Before I sign off, let me share why I’m here on Renee’s blog today.  She and I are both committed to updating this blog more consistently. While sometimes Renee and I joke about sharing a brain, you can tell from this post, we do not share writing styles.  But we’ll both be here more often trying to share pieces of our world here at SAMS.  We invite you to share questions and prompts to help us follow through on this goal.  Go ahead- we’d love to see some comments, thoughts, and questions.

Cheers,

Amy Kujawski