Yes, I Can

My motivational-thoughts calendar strikes again.  You see, I have this little desk calendar that I got as a free gift from some company, and I really like it. I love the ritual each morning of tearing off a sheet and getting that much closer to the end of time . . . or the year . . . whatever.  Plus, it has some pretty good quotes on it once in a while.  One of my favorites recently was from Albert Einstein: "We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them."  Good stuff, right? 

Well, this morning I tore off the previous day's page and saw this:

Yes, I know it's not exceptionally profound or anything.  But the thing is, this is the theme I would use to start off my school year with my students to get them excited about what they could do {focus on the positive, right?}.  I had all these pieces of paper that looked like soup cans, and I would make the kids think of a goal they wanted to complete during that school year, write it on the can, and then we would put up all the cans around a bulletin board that had that quote.  Throughout the year we would all be reminded of the goals we had set and what we wanted to accomplish.

It was always fun to see the variety of goals they would set.  Some would be silly {I can eat a whole package of Flamin' Hot Cheetos without drinking anything}; some would be a bit more ambitious {I can get straight A's all year}.  Reading that quote made me miss the feeling of helping those kids try to do something good, something that would make them better people.  It actually made me a little sad that I wasn't doing the goal-setting thing with a group of students anymore but was instead working in an office.

Hmm.

But then I remembered how smelly and obnoxious middle school kids can be.  So I nibbled on a delightful eclair my sister/co-worker brought me, and I felt better.