Fall 2025
Summer. In the educational world, it is a time for unwinding, relaxing, and regrouping before the start of the next school year. Oftentimes, it includes family vacations. After all, what better way to relax than to go camping in the woods, or relax on a beach, or visit loved ones you haven’t seen for a year.
Until you hit the roads. And the traffic. This summer, as I sat behind a line of stopped cars that seemed to stretch for miles, I felt a sense of frustration and anger building inside me. Why? Well, for someone who makes travel a game of how to beat the arrival time identified in Google maps, these traffic jams were putting me way behind schedule of arrival at my destination. I also had to endure even more aggressive drivers than myself who were trying to circumvent the line by switching lanes as we inched forward, or creating their own lanes on the shoulders of the highway. And then, as I finally got to the reason for the delay, I became even more frustrated at the fact the hold up was due to construction on bridges. “Honestly?” I thought. “50 yards of work have held me up for 30 minutes? You can’t schedule this work for the third shift? It would alleviate the traffic back up, and certainly provide more comfortable working conditions for the department of transportation folks.” And don’t we all have that in us? Trying to justify our feelings of frustration or anger or distress onto someone else by thinking to ourselves, “If only they could do/see things my way.”
One of my summer reads included the book, 13 Pillows of Affective Teaching. Written with educators in mind, and how they might bring hope and empowerment to their students, the lessons throughout the narrative can also apply to anyone interested in establishing more positive relationships with those around them. In order to do this, one needs to focus on building trust, fostering empathy, and promoting self-care as that will lead to more positive interactions. For educators, this translates into classrooms where students are more receptive to listening and learning from one another in a positive manner.
Building and repairing bridges. Maybe the next time we find ourselves sitting still on the roadway, we look at our situation not as a result of poor planning on someone else’s part, but as a reminder of the importance of being able to connect with those we are trying to foster relationships with if we truly want to be an integral part of their lives. For me, that’s all of our students. It would do me well to remember that without building a bridge to meet students where they are, I am not going to have much luck in having students ‘hear’ me as I try to instill in them hope and empowerment. As stressed in 13 Pillows of Affective Teaching, "Kids don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Here’s to a school year filled with building bridges to success.