I really enjoy my two weeks off of school every winter.  This year, I have an extra day.  My children had school on Friday, and I was off.  Great thing, right?  Well, my wife asked me to help with Christmas shopping.  Five stops and quite a bit of stress later, I was too wiped out to do anything except watch movies and look at my undisturbed pile of books.  A new appreciation for my wife’s hard work was born.

I think it’s natural for teachers to look at this as an opportunity to adjust course.  There are things we want to try, and things that might not be going well, and we want a chance to fix them.  We’re optimists – we think we have the power to change things.  And we often do.  But I think we (I) sometimes get a little too ambitious.

Here’s an example: the Wednesday before break, I checked out 20 books and movies that I wanted to read and watch over break.  With grading and planning, family fun, a trip to Ohio, and other things to do, this was a little ridiculous.  I’m also setting some pretty outrageous goals for myself beyond break – learning a language, writing a book (or two), preparing a proposal for a national conference, launching a new blog and YouTube channel (more later on this), and other, smaller things.

It’s too much.  Somebody said, “Aim for the stars.  Even if you miss, you’ll land in the clouds.”  Or something like that.  I’m not sure if this is a good thing – getting stuck in the clouds.  I’m not sure what will get accomplished.  But I figure that even completing 5% of this stuff would still be a pretty big deal. . .

So I’m making a list of huge goals.  I’ll try to avoid my annual post about the big goals I’ve set – my attempt at motivating myself by sharing, publicly, what I want to accomplish.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to stick to sharing some meaningful achievements as I move toward completing these goals.

Wish me luck.