The Ordinary Impact

I think it's a safe bet to say that no one expected cities, restaurants, and schools to shut down; but here we are living a new temporary normal. Like many educators, I am missing my classroom and students - and frankly, missing the ability to leave my house. That being said, social distancing has made me be intentional about how I connect with my friends, my students, and my family. The challenges created by COVID-19 have birthed creativity and innovation in my approach to how I educate my students and how I educate my seven year old at home. We have read together. We have learned about animals from Wild Kratts . We have learned about people in history from The Who Was? Show . We have taken virtual field trips to Hawaii , the Smithsonian , and regions of Italy and China . We have found ways to problem solve by building with Legos ; and we have practiced addition and subtraction by playing with Bakugan . Every day we discover new ways to learn. Every day we ...

From a young age, love just seemed like a natural feeling. I felt love for people until, whether implicitly or explicitly, people let me know that love might not need to be as open as I naturally believed it to be.Children love naturally. In fact, they love and trust so naturally that they need to be taught to be cautious about a stranger trying to give them free candy. We don’t teach people how to love because love comes naturally. However, we demonstrate how to love deeply, and we most certainly exemplify how to withhold love. And learning to withhold love is dangerous.  I’ve heard people use hateful words, (racially insensitive words, words that objectify women) and excuse them away because “they were raised in a different time.” Our hearts get trained to hate and to exclude and to accept injustice. On October 1, 1995, Nelson Mandela referenced this idea in a speech on the nature of love and hate: “ No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, ...