Back to School!

Five ways we all can tap into our student within

By Maggie Catchick-Houghton

For me, the beginning of the year has always been in the fall, not in January. As a teacher I never kicked the school routine, moving smoothly from grade school to high school to college to my work, always with the change of colors and cooler air signaling the beginning of a new year!

Along with football games and school busses, come new supplies of crisp paper, pencils still smelling of wood, and every other supply you can think of from markers to sticky notes; folders to paperclips. And with it all, the promise of a new beginning, new things to learn, the potential of the new person we may yet become.

As a teacher I get to join in with the kids on their excitement at the new year, but as an adult I’ve also found great satisfaction in taking a moment to reboot, so to speak, and begin again. This is a time of year when we all can take stock and consider what goals we have yet before us, what changes we can work toward, and what ways to delve into the new things we’d still like to learn!

So these are my tips for Back to School and they aren’t just for students! I hope we all can find some new energy that comes from this time of new beginnings. 

1.     Appreciate the changes in nature. We are lucky in Michigan to have the best of all seasons, and the quickest changes will take place in the next few months! Don’t forget to get outside and enjoy it all from the last days of summer to the colors of fall and the excitement of the first snows. Taking some time for nature, no matter how much studying and work you have yet to do, is always a great way to recharge.

2.     Be sure you have the tools you need. Back to school is a great time for stocking up on those little necessities. These are the items that fill our need to create and organize, to be ready for whatever comes next. Use this time to get ready for the coming school year and coming winter as well. Get organized and feel prepared with what you need… just think what you might be able to accomplish!

3.     Open yourself to learning something new. The best part of school is that we get to discover new things we never knew before. But that doesn’t have to end with our school days! Consider something you’ve always wanted to learn or learn more about and get into it! The Cheboygan Public Library website offers the free Mango Languages program if you’d like to learn a new language; there are yoga classes and sewing classes; even starting a new fitness program or joining a bowling league might be an excellent way to fire up your brain by starting something new.

4.     Get ready to read! Reading is something required in most every level of school, but it’s easy to get out of the practice of reading when it’s no longer required in your life. However reading is an excellent way to calm and quiet your mind, improve your focus and concentration, and learn something new in the process. So, this fall, commit to finding something to read. Now that you are out of school and it is no longer required, there are so many options! Visit the Purple Tree bookstore to find a new novel or book that will teach you about history, philosophy or some country you’ve always wanted to know more about. Use the library as a resource to read about memoirs or genealogy, and maybe even as the inspiration to write about your own family history or your childhood. Read the newspaper and seek out articles online to become better informed about current topics relating to our upcoming election or foreign issues in China and Iran. “Assign” yourself a topic of study and then follow your research wherever it may lead you.

5.     Set goals for the new year. Every year my students begin with setting goals for their learning and their personal lives and that’s a practice we can all take advantage of as the students head back to school. Unlike January’s resolutions that are made and forgotten by March, goals are set with an intention of reaching some place new and have measurable standards that can be monitored as we go. Your goals may involve getting healthy or spending less, but should be marked by clear guidelines you can monitor such as decreasing how many times you eat fast food or the amount you spend in certain routine situations. You can set goals for how many pages a week you will read or how many miles you will walk. Goals may extend to how much time you spend with family and friends or even keeping a gratitude journal to be mindful of your blessings each day. Setting goals and monitoring them each day or week can bring about a great sense of accomplishment. Before long we begin to find our new practices become routine and we have indeed grown and changed who we are, maybe not in a big way, but bit by bit. Just as we grew in our education each school year. It’s never too late to grow a bit and learn something new. And that’s why each fall we all need a little “back to school” to get us ready to learn again.

published in the Mackinac Journal, September 2015

My Advice to High School Seniors

My Advice to High School Seniors

 

My advice to seniors is simply this:

never listen to anyone’s advice.

Those words come from places of

experience, it’s true, but are

covered with cobwebs of regret and

longing, the caked on dust of disillusion,

they are shadowed by a life

that is not yours – nor will it ever be.

Don’t stop for advice or directions or a map

when the future stretches before you.

In fact, don’t stop for anything

unless it is to notice the way

sunbeams dance along the waters,

or trees swaying in the afternoon breeze,

the crinkles at the corners of your grandfather’s eyes

and the way your dog’s fur smells

after he comes in after an hour of

basking in the sun on the back porch.

May you come to something… unexpected!

Motherhood: The Greatest Balancing Act in the World

Mother’s day approaches each May, and across the country children of all ages turn their thoughts, count up their quarters, and put crayon to construction paper all to honor that most important person in their lives.

She is the one who kisses their bruised knees and constructs dinosaur-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their lunches. She is the one cheering loudest at the soccer games before whipping out homemade all natural frozen fruit pops for the team at half time. She supervises homework and schedules play dates, music lessons and tutoring. She presides over arts and crafts time, reading circles and thank you notes written on cut-out tracings of their hands and feet for Grandma.

She is the one canning organic baby food, washing out cloth diapers, reading up on gluten-free diets, scheduling doctor and dentist appointments, finding new ways to bleach hockey equipment, sewing the preferred purple sequins on gymnastics leotards, meeting with teachers for conferences, constructing mini models of the universe for the science fair, selling candy bars for new track warm ups, and more! Always, always, there is much more.

The sad truth is that our society demands so much of our mothers, and parents in general, it is no surprise that so many find themselves doing more than they ever imagined and still feeling like a failure at the end of the day.

But as a daughter, mother, aunt, teacher and observer of mothers in general, I’d like to suggest that there might be a better way for all of us. Mothers are amazing, it’s true, and it seems like our society not only puts them on a pedestal for all they do, it demands they build that pedestal higher and higher. It demands they give the proverbial “one hundred and ten percent,” for what could possibly be more important than the job of a mother?

From my observations, however, motherhood best achieves its true goal when it is not done perfectly. You see, being “the perfect mother” is not really about being perfect as a mother... it is about raising a healthy, well-adjusted and independently capable child. And, in my opinion, this is best accomplished by the “sort of okay” mother; the B+ mother; the not-so-perfect-all-too-human variety our society seems determined to make feel like a failure.

This is the mother who values not only her child, but also her sanity. This is the mother who teaches her child to overcome failure by overcoming her own mistakes with grace and a sense of perspective. This is the mother who allows her child to find his own sense of pride in a crooked project he made himself; who allows her child to realize she plays soccer for the joy of the game and her connection with her teammates, even if no one is there on this particular day to cheer her on. For our children, we are the example of balance in an increasingly demanding world, and by presenting them with a world where everything is taken care of for them, we do them a great disservice.

So my intent on this Mother’s Day is not to add one more level of stress to the overburdened mother who now might worry, Am I doing too much?? Rather, I hope we can give to ourselves the permission to laugh a little and lower the expectations that may not be doing anyone much good anyway.

When a mother can’t make her child’s T-ball game, she is still doing the best for him. When she wakes up late because the alarm didn’t go off and has to throw on some sweats and a baseball cap and rush the kids to school with pop tarts and a cold chicken leg from last night, it’s a great chance to teach them to smile, relax and do what you can do when life happens.

So to all the mothers out there doing laundry, cutting out stegosaurus sandwich stencils, baking gluten-free brownies and managing a five color coded calendar complete with fold out color key, know that you are doing great things for your children. But know also that on the days when you have to rinse out the football jersey in the sink and let it dry flapping out the window on the way to practice, or send him to school with two bananas, a cold pork chop and the left over chicken fried rice, or forget her oboe because you packed the ballet shoes and left her school project sitting next to the door on the back porch where it was left for the glue to dry faster, know that even on these days you are doing great things for your children.

Mothers try to do what is best for their children, but doing what is best for them often requires having the patience, trust and faith in the universe to let them do for themselves. Mistakes will be made, knees will get scraped, bugs, dirt, germs and other unknown substances will be ingested, but success in life comes not from never falling down, but rather from learning how to get up again.

published in the Mackinac Journal magazine for Mother's Day weekend, May 10.