During the moments before and after each class throughout the day, my fellow teachers and I are supposed to step outside our classroom doors into the hallway to keep an eye on the students as they travel to their next class. We are there to assure there’s no funny business. I don’t think I EVER did it last year. I would get too wrapped up in making preparations for my next class.  This year I am making a conscious effort to get into the hall. It’s one of my new professional habits. It has been a fairly easy habit to…

Everyone agrees that Covid, masks, and vaccinations have become irretrievably political. I am not looking to make any shocking or controversial claims here for or against masks. My gut says that they undoubtedly help some in hindering the spread of the disease. But I am the oddball who is equally suspicious of anybody who claims masks are either absolutely necessary or absolutely useless.  But I am a big fan of autonomy and freedom and I dislike paternalism.  Sarah was in tears last night because her school system has decided – three days into the new school year – to reinstitute…

The success I am seeing so far in breaking my procrastination habit comes mainly from picking up on the cue and using it to trigger a new behavior. In Duhigg’s book, the “cue” is the signal that sets off a craving, leading in turn to the habitual behavior, which is closely followed by the “reward”.  The cue can be the donut box in the teacher’s lounge that sets me on a path to eating pure sugar and fat when, a moment before I walked in, I was not even hungry. It could be a rising stress level that sends someone…

I am seeing everything through the framing of “habits” these days. And it is proving to be helpful. Most of my focus is on starting new good habits, on both the personal and the professional level. But part of my attention has gone to a particular bad habit I have of putting off even small tasks indefinitely. I never recognized this as a habit before because it manifests itself in such various situations at all times of day.  Here are some recent real examples:  I pull the minivan into our drive, notice an empty chip bag in the passenger seat…

I made the mistake this evening of going to see a movie with my three oldest kids and a couple of their friends. Spending time with my kids is not usually a mistake, but I guess it is when it involves watching something like Suicide Squad.  I didn’t do my research ahead of time and so the sheer volume of gratuitous violence caught me entirely off guard. A movie treating human life so cheaply is an automatic turn off for me, so in my mind there was nothing else about it that could possibly qualify as entertainment.  Hundreds of deaths…

I’ve got enough brain power tonight to assemble a handful of disjointed thoughts, so here we go: Caleb is home safe and sound. When I returned to the house after school, he was fast asleep on the couch in the basement, posed like a little boy. Had to remind myself he’s a young man just returned from his first real taste of military life.  As for my first day with students, I can’t complain. I also cannot call it my “first day of teaching”. There was no time for teaching – just rules all the teachers were required to go…

 God willing, tomorrow will bring two things: 1) Caleb, home after a month of basic training and  2) The first day of a new school year for me. I was going to make a joke about feeling greatly conflicted about tomorrow, not knowing whether to be eager or depressed, but in actuality, both of these things are going to be good. Obviously I am excited to see Caleb but I am also (mostly) eager to get going again at school.  And although I felt a bit depleted by the end of last school year, this year will be different. For…

Is it just my imagination or does BJ Fogg’s contention that people “change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad” run a broad parallel to the difference between the Old Covenant of the Law and the New Covenant of the blood of Jesus Christ? At least that is what I am seeing in the description of the two mountains in Hebrews 12. The first mountain is obviously Mt. Sinai, where the Lord first laid down the Law to his people after he brought them out of Egypt: 18 You have not come to a mountain that can be touched…