The Back to School Lists Hide What Really Matters

We know that getting all the things on the supply checklist still matters. But in his article for Ed Post, Colin Seale argues that what matters even more is that teachers can collect the checklist of our children’s expertise, superpowers, interests, struggles, and joys.  

Read an excerpt from “The Back to School Lists Hide What Really Matters” below…

I have always struggled with back-to-school anxiety. From my earliest memories of elementary school to my days teaching middle and high school math, I have always been stressed to the point of sleeplessness thinking about all the things we normally think about when asking, “are you ready for back-to-school?” When I hear that question, I immediately start worrying about all the “stuff.”

So much stuff. It’s ridiculous. As a person identified as gifted at 7 years old and diagnosed with ADHD at 37, I used to think that this stress came from the increasingly complex process of getting prepared for the first day.

At age 7, it was all about spending hours trying to put together my three-ring binder with my dividers for different subjects, knowing that a month later, it would be a raggedy, dog-eared hunk of junk with broken rings and papers flying out of it. In high school, my back-to-school energy was spent mentally preparing for having seven different teachers with seven different sets of classroom rules and expectations.

Read the full piece at Ed Post (Image and article credit)

https://www.edpost.com/stories/higher-back-to-school-standard