Outside the boundaries of our comfort, and a Bloggy Award!

First of all, I want to thank Sarah Mackey at Mackey's Classroom for the One Lovely Blog Award. Thank you, Sarah! What a totally and sincerely sweet thing to give another blogger. I'll be passing it along in my next blog post.

I'm back from our little vaca to the water park in the Wisconsin Dells. Remember my last post of having fun and playing? If you haven't watched the TedTalk from Stuart Brown, put it on your to-do list. If you have watched it, you now know the importance of playing. My hubs and I know it, too, and that's what we took our girls to do - play. Our brains should now be super-charged from all that playing we did! In fact, can I tell you how many great ideas I get while I'm having fun? I have a "no work" policy on play vacations, but I had to keep sneaking myself emails to remind myself later of the most excellent A-HA I just had.

This is about more than play, though. Ultimately, it's about comfort zones and going outside of them. You may or not know that I'm phobically afraid of scary rides. Phobic, like out-of-my-skin afraid. Pee-my-pants, cry-in-public kind of scared. Disney was magical enough to help me step outside my very established comfort zone enough to go on Space Mountain, which is the coaster I always quoted when I said "The only coaster I will ever go on is Space Mountain, and that's only if I ever go to Disney". Well, we did, and I did. So nowadays I'm all about not letting fear dictate what I do or not do.

Enter "The Howling Tornado".

Last time we were at the Dells I almost wet myself looking at it. My sister and I were those people, gawkers that stood outside of the ride line and said oooohhhhhhh and ohhhhhhh when the riders got off.

But this time? "I'm going on it". That's what I said to Bails and Liv. "I'm terrified and I'm going on it". Ok, so it took me until the last hour we were there, and I nearly chickened out. But then I DID IT. I climbed in that giant yellow tube and flew down a 60 ft drop, and then sloshed back and forth up the sides of a giant funnel.

What does this have to do with teaching or blogs? Well, it's all about our comfort zones. It's easy to settle into the things that are familiar and not venture into places that make us uncomfortable. You know, we often find our most significant growth doing things that are scary or that make us uneasy. So, it is with this spirit of venturing out of what is normal for each of us that I offer a challenge for all of my bloggy-friends. Here's what I would like to do:

I'm going to post a list of TedTalks that are relevant to our craft, the art of teaching. I would like you to choose one and watch it. Then I would like for you to talk about it on your own blog, sharing what you learned with your own readers. You should link or embed your video, so that your peeps can watch it too.

So why should this make us a little nervous or uneasy? We teach little ones, not big ones. But we should teach the big ones, too (that means each other!). I think we have more to gain in knowledge from each other than almost anything if we can only give each other the opportunity to tap it. So stay tuned...and please consider contributing your wisdom. Can you imagine the amount of knowledge we will spill into the net if we all did it? It would be amazing. Let it be known that we are very good at what we do because we never stop being learners ourselves.

And now these parting words. I overheard my Liv chanting this little ditty while walking down the hotel hallway.
"Hear no beaver. See no beaver. Feel no beaver."

I have no idea what that means, but it makes me laugh.