“Some things happen for a reason,
 Others just come with the season.”

-          Ana Claudia Antunes, The Tao of Physical and Spiritual

    Did you ever wonder how we come up with our topics for TriOpinion?  Sometimes we base our writing on events that occurred earlier in the week.  Sometimes we examine issues with which the parents of our gifted students are dealing.  This Labor Day weekend, the topic was hard-coming.  I mean, it could have been anniversaries.  JT and I finally had time to celebrate our 30th by traveling to Dallas to stay in the hotel in which we spent the first night of our honeymoon, and my son and his wife are celebrating their first anniversary.  Kay and Bria, however, were not celebrating anniversaries this weekend.  So…

  Cycles came because of the stream of football games on the satellite radio… and the promise of a cool front on Tuesday… and the fact that I always put my fall decorations up on Labor Day weekend. It still mostly seemed to be a topic I chose, but Kay and Bria agreed that they could write to that topic.  So, here goes…

   It’s stupid, I know, but one of the facts about heaven that I just can’t wrap my head around is the idea that time has no end.  The teaching profession is perfect for me:  there’s a definite beginning and ending, and there are three other little beginnings and endings at quarters.  Even Mondays and Fridays are beginnings and endings.  When something’s not going well, I just start over the next week… or the next quarter… or the next semester… or even the next year. I know that I will understand when I get there and will be so very happy to spend eternity in heaven, but for now, I am going to continue enjoying the cycles in my life on Earth!

   There’s a comfort in the familiar, isn’t there.  God was so smart to make seasons just about three months.  That’s about as long as the attention span for that season lasts.  Then we’re off to the next season in the cycle, welcoming it like an old friend.

   When I adjust the “binoculars of life” to panoramic, and survey decades at a time, I am always amazed about how often I’m in familiar territory.  Be it the topics of professional development or the “new ideas” for discipline methods, there are not really many ideas that haven’t just been re-cycled.  Because of this, we at Lawton Academy don’t jump on many “bandwagons.”  We tell the kids constantly, “Our school isn’t hard; we’re just teaching what schools used to teach and will someday come back to.” 

   A great example of this is the President’s Physical Fitness Test.  You remember, the test you did in PE in which you ran a mile, did a ton of sit-ups in one minute, and measured how flexible you were.  Believe it or not, we were still using the same test till around 2010, at which point, the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition decided to lessen the challenge and focus more on active lifestyles.  My kids made fun of how easy the standards were, and often we had to stop them from going on past the goal set for them.  Two-thirds of my student body easily passed this standard.  When the President’s Fitness Challenge also disappeared this last year, my kids and I decided to re-start the cycle ourselves. I pulled up the old fitness test standards, and I let the kids know that I had achieved the President’s Fitness Award both years I participated.  I had them examine the standards and asked if they thought they could do the same.  They let me know that they found the standards to actually be challenging and asked me to make them a copy.  So many asked that I ended up telling them I’d award a trophy for any who met the President’s Fitness Test standards by the end of the year, and a medal for those at the National Fitness level.  It has been great to see kids out training in pull-ups and running. 

    I guess my point to all of this is:  don’t get too excited about the “state” of things.  Children world-wide have years of not caring… and then years of immense caring… and so on and so on. Even in the life of one child, there are cycles.  Good ideas come… and go… and come again.  Some ideas swing more like a pendulum, but a circle is made eventually. 

-          Michelle