Monthly Archives: March 2022

Living, Write6x6

Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech

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I wake up to the first morning light, my brain recently bathed in glorious REM sleep. The restorative powers of sleep are legion: memory consolidation, increased problem-solving abilities, boosted immune functioning to name a few. There is evidence the brain performs a sort of housecleaning during shut-eye, making morning a ripe time for starting out the day with renewed clarity and potential.

So what do I do? Before my feet hit the floor, I grab my cell phone off the bedside table and let the fresh horrors of the overnight world infiltrate my blissfully open mind.

I tell myself that I am checking my phone because I have children. (But they are in their early 30’s, y’all.) Then, I see a red flag indicating I have e-mail, and without thinking I click to open it. And, while I’m here, I might as well check Facebook . . .

I know none of this is good. First, any student who e-mails me overnight is not writing to say what a wonderful teacher I am. Instead, it’s that there’s been a death in the family or they just plain forgot they had an assignment due at 11:59pm. And don’t get me started on how scrolling social media can affect mood.

I noticed a tendency to feel tethered to tech when I started teaching online full-time about five years ago. I had a gnawing sense that I needed to be able to respond to students at all hours of the day (and night). I thought that since I wasn’t actually teaching in-person, the tradeoff was making myself widely available to students.

So, I found myself reaching for my phone at stoplights, while I waited for my coffee, pretty much any time my brain was idle for a minute. Heaven forbid I should be left alone with my thoughts.

What I found, however, is that I was feeling exhausted all the time as an online teacher. I felt overwhelmed and a tad resentful. It seemed like I could never “catch up.” I know I’m not alone in this. Many teachers feel like their workdays never end, and that is because they don’t. Tech has a frightening way of blurring day into night, weekdays into weekends, our 40s into our 50s . . .

Over time I have discovered that most of the angst in my life can be traced to boundaries. According to Nedra Glover Tawwab, author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, the definition of boundaries is, “expectations and needs that help you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships.” Thus, a tech boundary is one set for your relationship with yourself.

Okay, so just set a tech boundary. I’ll just tell myself I won’t pick up my phone at the slightest hint of ennui. Easy, right?

Not so fast. What makes this a struggle is we battle our brain’s reward system when we fight tech. The little red dot with a number on it is anything but innocuous; it is there to prompt us to lay eyes on the alert. Tech shapes our behavior by hijacking the reward system.

So what’s the reward associated with opening overnight e-mail?  It actually might be the positive rush of seeing that there is, to quote my cop-husband, “nothing to see here” – that good feeling of realizing there are no fires to extinguish.

In her book Good Habits, Bad Habits, author Wendy Wood writes about creating “friction” around behaviors we want to discourage. In this way, we interrupt habits that are deeply grooved in our neural pathways. Here are some ideas I’m working on for putting friction between me and tech:

  • Remove work e-mail from my phone and home devices. This works as long as I don’t circumvent by logging into e-mail using my phone’s browser.
  • Alternatively, remove e-mail notifications from all devices. Can’t quite remove e-mail from your phone altogether? Disable the notifications that keep us coming back.
  • Designate three periods a day for checking e-mail. I am more successful with this on some days than others. But, I find I am more focused when I am not trying to multi-task.
  • Put my phone where it can’t be accessed quickly. I’m not as likely to grab my phone at every stop light if it isn’t right there on the console. At the grocery store, I can put my phone at the bottom of my bag.

The other day, while waiting for coffee at my local shop, I instantly reached for my phone and thought better of it. Even if there is an e-mail I need to respond to, must I do it right now? Instead, I immersed myself in the artwork on the walls and felt a better kind of rush.

Up next week – musings on setting time boundaries as a teacher.

The post Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech appeared first on My Love of Learning.

Living, Write6x6

Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech

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I wake up to the first morning light, my brain recently bathed in glorious REM sleep. The restorative powers of sleep are legion: memory consolidation, increased problem-solving abilities, boosted immune functioning to name a few. There is evidence the brain performs a sort of housecleaning during shut-eye, making morning a ripe time for starting out the day with renewed clarity and potential.

So what do I do? Before my feet hit the floor, I grab my cell phone off the bedside table and let the fresh horrors of the overnight world infiltrate my blissfully open mind.

I tell myself that I am checking my phone because I have children. (But they are in their early 30’s, y’all.) Then, I see a red flag indicating I have e-mail, and without thinking I click to open it. And, while I’m here, I might as well check Facebook . . .

I know none of this is good. First, any student who e-mails me overnight is not writing to say what a wonderful teacher I am. Instead, it’s that there’s been a death in the family or they just plain forgot they had an assignment due at 11:59pm. And don’t get me started on how scrolling social media can affect mood.

I noticed a tendency to feel tethered to tech when I started teaching online full-time about five years ago. I had a gnawing sense that I needed to be able to respond to students at all hours of the day (and night). I thought that since I wasn’t actually teaching in-person, the tradeoff was making myself widely available to students.

So, I found myself reaching for my phone at stoplights, while I waited for my coffee, pretty much any time my brain was idle for a minute. Heaven forbid I should be left alone with my thoughts.

What I found, however, is that I was feeling exhausted all the time as an online teacher. I felt overwhelmed and a tad resentful. It seemed like I could never “catch up.” I know I’m not alone in this. Many teachers feel like their workdays never end, and that is because they don’t. Tech has a frightening way of blurring day into night, weekdays into weekends, our 40s into our 50s . . .

Over time I have discovered that most of the angst in my life can be traced to boundaries. According to Nedra Glover Tawwab, author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, the definition of boundaries is, “expectations and needs that help you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships.” Thus, a tech boundary is one set for your relationship with yourself.

Okay, so just set a tech boundary. I’ll just tell myself I won’t pick up my phone at the slightest hint of ennui. Easy, right?

Not so fast. What makes this a struggle is we battle our brain’s reward system when we fight tech. The little red dot with a number on it is anything but innocuous; it is there to prompt us to lay eyes on the alert. Tech shapes our behavior by hijacking the reward system.

So what’s the reward associated with opening overnight e-mail?  It actually might be the positive rush of seeing that there is, to quote my cop-husband, “nothing to see here” – that good feeling of realizing there are no fires to extinguish.

In her book Good Habits, Bad Habits, author Wendy Wood writes about creating “friction” around behaviors we want to discourage. In this way, we interrupt habits that are deeply grooved in our neural pathways. Here are some ideas I’m working on for putting friction between me and tech:

  • Remove work e-mail from my phone and home devices. This works as long as I don’t circumvent by logging into e-mail using my phone’s browser.
  • Alternatively, remove e-mail notifications from all devices. Can’t quite remove e-mail from your phone altogether? Disable the notifications that keep us coming back.
  • Designate three periods a day for checking e-mail. I am more successful with this on some days than others. But, I find I am more focused when I am not trying to multi-task.
  • Put my phone where it can’t be accessed quickly. I’m not as likely to grab my phone at every stop light if it isn’t right there on the console. At the grocery store, I can put my phone at the bottom of my bag.

The other day, while waiting for coffee at my local shop, I instantly reached for my phone and thought better of it. Even if there is an e-mail I need to respond to, must I do it right now? Instead, I immersed myself in the artwork on the walls and felt a better kind of rush.

Up next week – musings on setting time boundaries as a teacher.

The post Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech appeared first on My Love of Learning.

2022write6x6, 6x16, 9X9X25 Challenge, Write6x6

Wow! Some Travel & Mobile App

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I had grand plans to use the WordPress app to write a post or two these last two weeks. Nope.

I visited Scotland and Ireland and had a wonderful time. I met some people I have known on Twitter for like 10 years! I had never met them face to face till this trip! It was wonderful. Really amazing to have shared so much, all across time and space without ever standing in front of one another. 

These are people I met through the wild world of #ds106

Together we built histories of families, histories of towns, and a beautiful Alchemy Lab. Here is the lab.

And this joyous dance that was four years or so in the making!

This is a story of that place. 

So now I am back home and trying to recover from the adventure. This is my post. 

The post Wow! Some Travel & Mobile App first appeared on The Whole Classroom.
6x6, Random Musing, Write6x6

6x6x3 Me and The Unevenly Distributed Now

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Hah! I was not only off by 1 in my opening for Write 6×6 I somehow missed last week, being this thing called “Spring Break” was a bonus week (?). According to the Writing Ideas page, this is week 2, so I am off by one ahead. Do I stop?

Shrug, rules need not apply here. This is my blog. Pffffffft.

The suggested theme is “Growth: What lessons are you learning as we live and work amidst a pandemic? How has your work or teaching practice evolved since the spring of 2020?”

I’ve had this one in that draft space in my grey matter, and have kept the tab open with the featured image for… weeks?

Back Then: A ~Clever Presentation Slide

In that ever fading past, that part of my career when I was trying to rev up excitement for educational technology at the Maricopa Community Colleges (yes anyone at the Write 6×6 home at Glendale Community College, I used to be a “District Person” at the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction oh now the I is for Innovation, that’s better).

It might take time to find when I started using it, but it seemed to make me feel prescient to reference the clever phrasing of writer William F Gibson that goes back to the 1990s:

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed

William F. Gibson, maybe in the 1990s

You can feel a swell of profoundness just uttering it. Or tossing it on a screen. Wearing it on a t-shirt (preferably black).

This is all hindsight. At the time, the context of the work I was doing (horizon reporting et al), it was, well pretty good.

It worked well to talk about new technologies, the things that might be futuristic were likely present somewhere. I found I used it in a 2005 presentation for the TCC Online conference where somehow I framed it around the Harry Mudd character from the ancient Star Trek series.

harry_mudd07
harry_mudd07 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

Now it seems more like a stretch to be clever. Or sound so. But that saying seemed fitting at the time. 2005.

What was in the future? Was a global pandemic and societal lockdown unevenly distributed? I had read / watched my share of apocalyptic future sci fi (cough, many views of The Andromeda Strain as a kid).

March 2020: Enter Together

I must have missed the announcement of 2 years since the COVID lockdowns, is it marked on a calendar? We all have our tales. Cori and I were following news stories in January 2020, and worrying in February. I recall stocking up on food supplies, even filling 2 containers of spare fuel stored out in the shed.

Still we had a planned trip to Arizona in mid February, the last time we were on a plane. Doing “normal” things. We were staying overnight in mid-March in Regina at a hotel where Cori had a few days of a professional workshop development. I think her school closures were announced March 16.

And that was something I have mulled over a while. It seemed like the world entered this together, at least in time (?). There seemed maybe a shared understanding of being in this together, cooperating to “flatten the curve.” Might there be unity? Cooperation at a global level?

Wow does that seem quaint.

For me, not much changed with the way I work. I have been doing full time remote work since 2006. The how was not new. Conferences I was part of helping organize were all online, were before that was an occasional, almost exotic (?) thing. The difference? Mostly everyone else was working from home too. Meeting on screens in boxes.

March 2022: The Unevenly Distributed Exit (?)

Here we are. It’s somewhere two years past the lockdown (is that marked in some weird calendar as some anti-holiday?).

What I never really thought about was how uneven the exit, if it is that, from covid-19. It’s more than unevenly distributed, it’s shredded tattered. Mandate is a dirty word, and then were decreed null/void at all kinds of different times at different places. Is there even a curve to look at and do something about the shape? People are getting sick and that’s gotten just normalized, something to wade out, to do your turn.

A piece of cloth is a stifling of your freedom?

That “in this together” seems completely naive. The world has moved on to war and melting the ice caps.

My photo, yet to be uploaded to flickr, but it shall be released under CC0.

And there is this idea, it seems to me, if schools, restaurants, airports, etc, all “open” again and we go back there, it will be okay. Things will fix themselves. Or just not this.

Listening to the School’s Out Forever episode of This American Life really brought home how un-magical or wildly magical our thinking is.

I’d like to say more about it, but then it would be a spoiler.. except from Act One, where what we think of as school might just be a television show. I cannot urge you enough to take in this episode. Well, maybe all of their episodes.

My Own Uneven Distributedness

This is my blog, so I get to make me a topic if I want, right? Just re-establishing our practices of pre-March 2020 makes me feel out of synch. I find my focus really, well out of focus, and heap of uncertainty about finding the sparks in work, projects, things that fired me up before… just are not quite firing.

And so the lopsidedness of this pandemic entry/exit hit me now. The logistics of going into lockdown mode were not a challenge- that was how I have worked a long time. I can’t figure out why this side of the tube has me so un at ease. Things in the places around me look the same, I go about doing errands (right now working from the mechanics)… it should feel the same it did pre march 2020, but it just does not. Even SPLOTs are not getting much juice any more.

My wheels are spinning in my own mud.

Now I know I am going to far from unique at this state of unease, even if it seems like the rest of the edtech world is joyfulling posting Wordle scores and tweeting the trials and tribulations of conference travel. We are so far from really even knowing the long term implication of pandemic stress. Hah, what a fool, somehow I thought I might be immune.

What I do have is an amazing and loving wife, a home in the country with space, foxes, and sunsets, a happy dog, and 2 playful cats.

So What?

When this post was bouncing around the draft space of my brain, it seemed to have good points to make. But I lost that when I started writing (hah, in the past it worked the other way, a fuzzy idea would coalesce to something in the writing process).

I will say this, though, and maybe I did drift from the practice. The brain engagement of chewing on ideas that blogging thoughts, ideas, etc still is important to me. I do not get this same mental workout in the status app scrolling. The blogging, the outboard brain thinking, does seem to do what it always did. Gotta get back on this wagon more.

But another shtick from those mid-2000s presentations kind of haunts me. Back then, what I remember was trying to address the dread I seemed to hear from educators, like “there’s too much good stuff, I cannot keep up”. Imagine, the stress was just being exposed to too many resources and ideas.

I would try to offer comfort with a question of, how do we face this world, with a sense of dread:

Slide07
Slide07 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

And I would say, maybe we can just look at the same world with a sense of curiosity, joy?

Slide08
Slide08 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

It seemed like how we could face the same world was really on us, and if we could keep the possibility in mind, rather than the dread of mastery.

That seemed simple then. I used those slides a lot.

Now I have to try it again on myself.

Pick a slide, Alan, (1) or (2). Maybe it’s both. Or neither.

How is your sampling of the unevenly handed out future? Is your slice tastier than mine?

Featured Image:

2013/365/46 Braided Flow
2013/365/46 Braided Flow flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Write6x6

We are Climbing

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________ 2022…

            I look above at empty space

            A place of progress to embrace.

            I look below at growth erased

            A wall of advancement to trace.

________ 2016

            A marriage, and a home, and a personal business.

            My former student finished her dissertation on forgiveness.

            And now I read students’ papers about Freud, or Chaplin, or Knapp

            and their personal stages of development.

________ 2001

            A home bought from a divorcee who loved white furniture,

            and twenty students of mine won Gold in Speech as a determiner

            of class, and status, and I held down three jobs

            while struggling with Said, Baldwin, Spivak and Hobbs.

________ 1991

            A shared bedroom with a Dutchman in the Back Bay,

          while teaching students how to argue and write a persuasive essay.

            Eating dry Ramen, and working at various jobs with various sharks

            hardly gave me time to read Foucault, Derrida, or Marx.

________ 1989

            As a student in an apartment with a sleeping bag on the floor,

            and three roommates who thought cleaning a chore.

            I saved my paychecks from the theater and hours at Taco Bell,

            and read books by Kant, Plato, and Hegel.

________ 1966

            As a child I grew taller in a vintage mobile trailer

            with deluxe appliances for my mother and a sailor.

            I mobilized the American Dream in the tree-less plains

            of Western Nebraska and read Dickens, O’Neill, and Twain.

Once, long ago, pencil marks on the kitchen archway measured our rise like weeds climbing to taller heights and we grew. Reviewing the lines on the wall shows us where we were and where we are, and all the unmarked space of where we could grow. Now that the years passed, the seeds of knowledge grow old within us, and blossom more slowly, more invisibly, and the development becomes us well. The markings of growth no longer in the kitchen but on a cloud of students and classrooms. They help us climb each rung, and with each new learner, we acquire strength and pull up to the next level. But what is it growth is for, that has endured much, but to endure more?

To grow we must know from where we came,

where we started this old measuring game,

and recognize the dates on the wall.

progress, Write6x6

Just Be Happy About Your Progress

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I have to laugh at myself this morning as I sit staring at my blank computer screen, thinking this must be what my students are talking about when they say they can’t think of anything to write about. I always think how can that be when I gave you the topic. I was given the topic of growth, yet I still can’t think of anything to write. Well, nothing beyond not being able to think of anything to write. I tell my students when this happens to just write and see what comes out. It may not be good and may not fit the assignment, but be happy about your progress. It’s something. Yeah, it’s working.

At what point do faculty stop growing? Is growth a continuing process? or do we at some point stop and say I’m good. Been there. Done that. I remember when I was younger, we would complain about the older faculty and how they never wanted to try new things or do anything. They would say, “oh we tried that already. It didn’t work.” Being the smart alec that I was, I always wanted to reply, “well, the 2000s are nothing like the 50’s so perhaps another try is in store?” Of course, I never said that. I also always wondered where half our faculty were. When you look around campus and take notice about who’s running things, it was always the same faculty in charge of things. When I first transferred to GCC, there were faculty in my department that I didn’t see for years and had never met. That’s just weird.

But as I start to finish up my 32nd year of teaching, I think I get it. I am starting to feel like we’ve done ALL this before, and to be honest I can’t remember if it worked or not or why we stopped doing certain things in the first place. It’s easy to just step back and let everyone else do all the work, hide out in my office (which is home right now) and do nothing and just be happy about my progress. I get it now.

Nah, that’s not for me. Growth takes progress. Progress is advancement and development through time, doing things, helping people, getting better at your craft, and finding new crafts. You never know where you’re going to end up, but you can guarantee you’ll end up somewhere if you just try, or in this case, just start writing. See, look at that. I have a blog post. Progress!

6x6, faculty development, learning design, Miscellanea, Write6x6

6×6-2 The Compulsory Arts

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[Apologies in advance for this ramble. Out of desperation I resorted to headphones, a timer, and an unedited—other than fixing basic spelling/grammar errors and formatting footnotes8—writing sprint.]

It’s been a few years since I’ve explored the research into the challenging relationship between instructors and instructional designers, but a quick trawl today at least makes clear that no magic communication cure-all has appeared1.

I say “challenging,” but anyone who works in learning design knows the common framing question is, “how do we overcome faculty resistance?” Or, as the more jaded might ask amongst themselves, “why do we have to spend so much time convincing faculty to just pick up some of those $%&# gold nuggets?“

Some of the highest hurdles to teaching excellence are systemic: even assuming that an instructor can overcome the natural trap of “good enough,” and wants to improve continuously for their own reasons, most are trapped inside a double-layer of smothering bureaucracy. Teaching is usually not accorded the importance it deserves—if it is seen2 as important at all—and plays a correspondingly small, effectively unimportant role in promotion and tenure, compensation, workloads, etc. And this broken system is stuffed, turducken style, into institutions that not only aren’t philanthropic in nature, though they often like to pretend they are, but are actually big businesses in which credit hours and high-minded rhetoric are scanty fig leaves for real currency.

So I understand the reluctance. Academic work can be difficult, time is in short supply, and they aren’t paid by the hour.

But teaching is both craft and art. It’s more than a calculation of time and effort, more than the imagined billable hours on the mental meter salaried instructors frequently have running in their head. Good craftsmanship and creative teaching are hard. Caring about learners and working to improve are often Herculean labors7 that, unlike those faced by the mythical hero, don’t stop at a mere dozen. In fact, they don’t end at all, placing real demands on instructors and designers alike to manage their time. I frequently say that both could spend the rest of their careers improving and transforming a single course, but that isn’t our blessing/curse.

However, the answer isn’t spending as little time as possible on preparation and teaching, either, turning what should be creating a world of connection and learning into a producing a minimum viable product. I understand when good enough to go teach a course has to be good enough to stop improving a course. I don’t understand why so few teachers put in the effort to go further. Where are the artists challenging themselves of their own accord? The craftspeople who want to go beyond assembling items from the publisher’s versions of IKEA?

I’ve been in this field for a long time and, in the end, I don’t believe this kind of creative striving is something that can be instilled, only discovered and cultivated. I can work to establish relationships with instructors and gain their trust, facilitate learning communities, and put on events. I can provide cookies and coffee. If I’m fortunate, I can provide stipends and release time. These things will help some teachers do more for a while but, as the cliché goes, the motivation and passion have to come from the inside. Extrinsic motivations, even if maintained materially, are not enough to foster permanent change. Teachers who want to pick up and spend those bags of gold have to do it for themselves, the same way writers have to choose to put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard3 without being told to and, for the vast majority, with insufficient compensation and little to no fanfare.

All of this is why the common framing in the instructional design world of overcoming resistance and convincing faculty feels off. Before instructional design work of consequence can happen, the instructor needs to have an authentic, intrinsic desire to create work of consequence. Before faculty development events can succeed, those motivated faculty need to be found—or aided in discovering their own creative ambitions.

As a poet4, I’ve taken my fair share of poetry classes and workshops and had the fortune of leading them myself. In many ways, the pursuits of writing poetry and teaching demand, if one is to “succeed” at them, the same things: desire, intrinsic motivation, and the willingness to find the time to put in the hard intellectual labor at a pursuit that will never be finished.

But poetry writing classes are attended by people who want to write poetry. No one is being forced to be a poet, and teachers don’t spend time trying to convince their students that creative writing is a vast, life-long discipline, and poetry a demanding art form.

Faculty, on the other hand5, are often practically forced to teach. For the most part they don’t recognize, or they discount, education as a real discipline, and they don’t understand that teaching is an art. And I’m not even going to get started on lack of knowledge of, and disrespect for, the discipline and art of learning design6, even as those designers have to simultaneously do their actual work and fill in for what would be, in the poetry analogy, introductory literature classes that provide exposure to different authors and work ahead of some of them self-selecting into that world.

As I said earlier, some of this is systemic. A real solution would involve recognition and review of teaching, unbundling research and teaching, proper compensation for dedicated teachers, and much more. Meanwhile, while teaching remains for most a necessary sidelight to achieve things they feel are more important, and part-time lecturers are given little or no time for development of themselves or their courses, learning design is left to attempt the impossible: creating compulsory, collaborative art.

1. The pharmaceutical industry is woefully behind in created such a wonder drug.
2. A sad reality is that even the pretense of prioritizing teaching is often dropped, leaving teachers who want to excel “seen” in the same way one might note that a driver saw a pedestrian…and ran them over anyway.
3. And often head to table, hard.
4. Or more accurately, former poet and MFA program deserter.
5. Particularly full-time, tenure-track and tenured faculty.
6. Maybe another time. But it’s bad. At least once a week an instructor will ask, essentially, how they can quickly “pick up instructional design” when they have a bit of free time.
7. If you’re getting bored already, may I direct you to reading Stephen Fry’s depiction of Heracles in his excellent book Heroes.
8. Yes, I do think with footnotes!

[CC-BY image by lylejk]

Write6x6

To be an exceptional Nurse: Growth as a mindset

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The New Nursing Student 🌳

Dr. Ingrid Simkins

As a student begins their new journey in nursing school there is a mindset that, if adopted, can garner student success and that is the ‘bloom where you are planted’ philosophy. This landscape called nursing school provides soil that is rich, fertile, and just begging for a new seedling to take root. The difference between that seedling bearing fruit and just existing is growth. 

🌳Growth, such a positive word, but one that also comes with a set of growing pains. Perhaps before nursing school classroom success took minimal effort, was a solo mission, and came with the reinforcement of an “A” to validate your contributions…what could be painful about that? Nothing at all! However, you are now in a new environment, one where the conditions are unfamiliar and success now comes with hours of practice, intentional effort, potential setbacks, and opportunities to receive constructive feedback that may not feel as good as that “A”. However, you persevere and realize that when you lean on those around you in a give and take dichotomy, your growth is less of a struggle.🌳

🌳Wherever you are in the nursing program right now, I ask you to take a moment and reflect upon your personal growth. Where are you now compared to that first day of nursing school? The end of the first semester? Whenever you feel doubt in yourself or your growth think about the following…

The New Graduate Nurse🌳

Dr. Mary Resler

As a new graduate nurse the career field is broad. It is like a blank canvas that only you as a nurse have the power to control the end products. In order to get there a lot of growth takes place. Growth in the profession can be positive and challenging at the same time.

One of my favorite quotes is “there is no growth in comfort and, there is no comfort in growth.“ 

If we are not growing then we are standing still. 

As a nurse you must be prepared for lifelong education. As evidence-based practice continues and new medical advances take place the nurse must continue to educate themselves to be the best for their patients. Many new graduate nurses feel a sense of relief and accomplishment when they pass the nursing program and the NCLEX-RN licensure exam. Although the education piece may have been accomplished, the learning and growing – is just a beginning.

The New Nurse Educator🌳

Dr. Grace Paul

🌳All great students are not great test takers, and all great nurses were not great test takers. Likewise, all great bedside nurses are not necessarily the best educators! I started out as a community health nurse in India. The Vellore Christian Medical College and Hospital Nursing College has adopted quite a few villages around, and community health nurses worked alongside the government workers for the area. As a community health nurse, I was responsible for one village of about roughly 1000 people. As the College of Nursing Community Health Nurse (CONCH), among my many responsibilities, I also had 2-4 students assigned to me for their community health experience.   🌳

I still remember my first two students who were assigned to me. I was feeling awkward inside, since I was myself new in the role of a community health nurse, and then to have to be a role model to these two students! I was scared that I might say something wrong! Just like when I was a student, I used to have nightmares that I had slept through my alarm, and the student had arrived and was searching for me, and that I lost all the assignments that were submitted to me! Students rarely realize that as a new instructor, we are quite vulnerable too. But for the most part, we try to put on a brave face, because we don’t want to lose our credibility! We want the students to have a good experience! I, of course, grew out of those nightmares in a few months. 

Positive Growth Quotes. QuotesGram

🌳As a novice educator, there are so many qualities that need to be cared for, tended to, and developed. With the pandemic, all of us have evolved and grown to the extent that even we did not think we were capable of! That is what humans do, we rise to the occasion, when we are challenged. And so, it is good to keep ourselves  challenged, so that we can learn new things, keep our mind active, and although we may grow older, we can still be relevant when younger generations of students come to us.

 🌳As  an educator, we need to be relevant, and current, and learn the ways our students learn, so that we can be effective in our role as educators! We have to continually reflect on our own teaching philosophies, build on creating a trusting relationship with students, where students are able to think critically, and feel free to ask questions. Teaching a student to think critically is a skill that educators must develop. Every student learns differently, and as educators, we must meet them at their level. The pandemic has taught us the importance of self care, and this goes both ways. Just as food and rest are necessary for our physical bodies, positive thoughts, reflection or meditation are necessary for our souls!🌳

Best Growth Quotes | Readershook
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Going Quiet

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My lock down did not come in 2020. It came in late 2017, when nine metal screws held the bones of my shattered upper arm in place to a titanium bracket. I spent the next four months in physical therapy for my shoulder and hand and the rest of the time in bed. I was not allowed to drive. I spent most of 2018 trying to forget about the pain by reading constantly. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time thinking; I spent no time creating. It’s amazing what you can’t do when you don’t have the use of your dominant hand and arm. I couldn’t write – (I’d also broken my thumb) but fortunately I could still type – which allowed me to continue teaching online. A beat was never missed.

In the autumn of 2019 I tried to re-join the world by working out with a trainer trying to get back into some semblance of shape. The adhesions in my arm were tolerable to a point and getting stronger seemed the only way to improve my life.

When 2020 hit, our family was in full stride. My husband and I had just returned from a respite in Tucson when everything seemed to lock down. I wasn’t trying to suddenly “get” my courses online because they were online. It felt strange when so many were desperately trying to put their learning online. My courses have taken years of finessing to get them just right. I couldn’t imagine trying to do it in a few weeks, but there was no way to help.

Suddenly, we had so many people in our neighborhood that I’d never seen before. Dogs started getting walked two or three times a day! But after a while, online learning and Zoom meetings seemed to make everyone weary, and we all yearned for more personal contact. This is no great personal insight. It’s what most of us went through.

We had a couple of incidents during this time and on separate occasions two gallbladders out of three in our family were now gone. (I felt we should have gotten a two-for-one special!) No concerts, no travel to concerts, only broadcasts – often from people’s closets. Once the gym opened up my trainer cajoled me into going back into training – but with a mask, which I still wear. By then, my husband and I had worn out our treadmill and stationery bike. We had to replace them both.

We are incredibly lucky. We were used to being and doing things at home. We stayed there and hunkered down. In the first years of his life, my son was in and out of the hospital, and was quarantined every winter. We already knew how much we could lose. For us, when two of us got Covid at Christmas, in 2021, it was not the death sentence it was sure to have been if my son had gotten it earlier – before vaccines. And because of this, I am incredibly grateful.

Did we grow during this time? Probably not in the way I would have thought. We became more patient and began to appreciate each other more. Life got quieter. We had more time to be together without having to race off to an event. We had time to just be.

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Three Positives of the Pandemic

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The negatives of the pandemic are abundant so I am going to stick to three of the positives I identified from the pandemic. 

We are stronger than we know

During the pandemic we all had a hard time. I was reminded of a TED talk I watched with my Reimagine cohort. In this talk, Ash Beckham spoke about how everyone in their lifetime experiences hardship. This resonated with me since worldwide we were experiencing hardship. I know that not only am I stronger than I know but so are students, neighbors, colleagues, friends, and strangers. There is no doubt that the pandemic has altered all of us in some capacity but I am confident that we are stronger than we know. 

TED talk shown in Reimagine – Ash Beckham

We are more inventive than we know

March 2020 put us all in a “make-it-work” situation as we prepared to go fully online to support the education of our students. This event has propelled faculty and students to new heights of innovation. We have found ways to connect with one another, learn from each other, and be more flexible when things inevitably deviate from our intended outcome. I know that I am more inventive and flexible when things fall apart in my lessons and life. I have seen people around me doing the same thing. We are more inventive than we know. 

I am more empathetic that I know

I have always struggled with the ability to empathize with students. Most of it comes from the more pessimistic outlook that I have that students are constantly trying to get out of completing the work for my courses. The outlook is bleak and gets me and my students nowhere. I have found that the pandemic has made me more empathetic in the sense that I am able to imagine how the student is feeling and thinking during times of hardship. This has helped me to implement a grace period on assignments and I weigh the students perspective on the issue they are facing before responding to them. My communication has improved through the pandemic and I know I am more empathetic because of the pandemic. 

The pandemic has been unimaginable for all of us but I hope that you (all of you) can also see how amazing we have become by living through a pandemic.