Refocusing what is Important
I live on a 300-acre dairy farm. To say I live in a mess is an understatement. I literally live across the street from a manure pit. The cows wake, milk, eat, sleep, poop, repeat. All day, every day. The cows must be milked twice a day and the barn must be cleaned. Yet even with all of this scheduled clearing and maintenance, the barn is never clean and the cows are always dirty. It is a never ending sisyphean cycle of futility that feels a lot like teaching right now. There is this perpetual mess that is so uncomfortable, stinky and gross in teaching right now. I am struggling each day to keep it clean.
Last year, I worked really hard at envisioning what the next steps in education would be like. I wrote a couple of articles, attended workshops and optimistically plotted a course. Then I waited for the big pause, the moment when we all stopped and redefined what was next, thought it through and went back in with a renewed commitment to what education is supposed to be. I was 
waiting for us to clean up the mess. Unfortunately, that moment of a clean break never arrived, and we muddily headed back into the school year deaf to the wisdom and lessons we were supposed to learn and the changes we promised one another we would
make to better the broken system and help our kids. Much like my farm life where the mess is ever present, my school life is a mess that is ever present. I have come to realise that if I cannot break from the messiness, then I must rest in the mess.
To rest in the mess is to come to terms with the situation and to stop trying to make it something it is not. We are not in a normal school year. The system is reeling from the disruption of routines and regularity that we lost with Covid. Our students exercised phenomenal agency over their own lives in the last almost two years. They are irritable and unsettled because they are giving up some of their newly acquired power and self-direction. This is making for a school community of “I’s” instead of “we’s.”
When we are all in the same building, same room and same space, we are a riot of undirected energies making school feel chaotic and, well, a mess. I have come to realise that I cannot change the mess around me, but I can settle the mess within. I hope that by settling the mess I feel inside myself, I will model for my students healthy behaviours and attitudes that they can adopt to feel the mess within each one of them calm and, in turn, calm the community.