What You Can (and Can't) Control

According to Blogger, this is my 500th post.  I debated about whether to try something special and decided just to keep it a regular post.

Yesterday, I saw the movie Oppenheimer.  I'll save you the review, but it is dark and difficult in ways I was not expecting.  Brace yourself if you decide to go see it.  One of the more interesting takeaways for me came from a moment after the successful test at Trinity.  The military is driving away with crates containing the bombs that would be dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Oppenheimer is conflicted about its use, but it is clear he has lost control of his own creation as it drives away.  He had been in charge of this project, but he was not in charge of the result.

Earlier this summer, I blogged about my summer goals.  While I have met goals related to reading, school work, and home projects, the goals I have been most invested in this summer have been related to working out at the YMCA.  This is the sticky note on my computer where I listed my goals to hold myself accountable.  I have completed the first four goals, and I will continue doing three of them from now on (not the 12 miles - that would be unrealistic to make a regular thing, but I wanted to see if I could do it once).  In kickboxing last week, I came very close to completing the last goal on the list, but there is a weird jumping jack that I didn't try.  I will do it this week.  While my pushups are getting a little better, I'm not sure I will be able to call that goal completed because I saw myself in the mirror today while I was trying them.  My elbows are bending more than they were in May, but they aren't bending far enough to call them pushups. 

Anyway, the point of this post isn't to congratulate myself on meeting my goals.  It is to point something out.  None of the items on that list are about weight loss.  I don't own a scale because women have such an unhealthy relationship with that number, so I wouldn't know anyway.  There is nothing about inches or a clothing size I want to fit into, although surely I hoped to fit comfortably into my Tuesday pants again because that's their job.  All of the goals are things I wanted to be able to do, not changes I wanted to see in my body.  Why?  Because I have control over what I do, but I do not have control over how my body will respond.  I'm not going to lie; I'm pretty happy with how it has responded, but if I had chased those numbers, I might have done the exact same things I'm doing now and not achieved them, resulting in feelings of failure rather than accomplishment.  I wanted to set goals that were related to things I could control.

Teachers, as the school year starts, you are going to be setting a lot of goals.  Keep the lesson of Oppenheimer and my workouts (a combination I never imagined typing).  Recognize what you can and cannot control.  Don't set goals like, "Half my children will make As" or "Every student will love me." Those things are not in your control.  In their book, Clarity for Learning, John Almarode and Kara Vandas say that students and teachers should know three things when going into a learning activity - What they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they will know when they have achieved success.  This should guide your goal-setting as well.  Figure out what is important to you to do or to have your students do.  Then, you will know what you are hoping to accomplish and why.  If you say you will "engage each class in retrieval practice at least five times per month" or "upload lesson plans on time every week," you will know what you are doing.  If you chose them for a reason, you will know why you are doing it.  And it is easy to identify success in a goal like that.  Put it on a list and cross it off when you have done it.  Tracking your progress is motivating, not being able to tell if you are successful because your goal was too nebulous is de-motivating.

There is much in the world of education we cannot control.  We cannot control the home lives of our students, no matter how much we might like to.  We cannot control the attitude or motivations of our students, although there are many evidence-based techniques we can use to challenge motivation.  You cannot control the broken nature of the system, no matter how many red shirts you wear.  You cannot control another teacher's policies that frustrate you because your philosophy is opposed to theirs.  Instead of wringing your hands over those things, focus on your actions in your sphere of influence.  Set your goals based on what you can control, and stop fretting over the things you cannot.