Teaching Middle School ELA
Welcome to the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast, where we are dedicated to helping English Language Arts teachers create dynamic and engaging lessons for their students, while also managing the day-to-day responsibilities that come with being a Middle School ELA teacher.
As educators ourselves, we understand the challenges of finding a work-life balance that allows us to pursue our passion for teaching while also enjoying our personal lives. That's why each Tuesday, hosts Caitlin Mitchell and Jessica Cannata share practical and innovative solutions for managing your workload and staying inspired in your teaching practice.
Whether you are looking for fresh ideas to inspire your students, strategies for improving your writing instruction, or tips for managing your time more effectively, this podcast is designed to provide you with the tools you need to thrive as a Middle School ELA teacher.
Join us each week for curriculum and lesson ideas, classroom stories, and interviews with fellow educators who are experts in the field. We believe that with the right support and resources, you can create a classroom environment that encourages students to become strong and passionate learners.
If you teach reading and writing to middle schoolers and want to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in ELA education, then this is the podcast for you! Tune in every week and let us help you make a difference in the lives of your students and in your own teaching career.
Teaching Middle School ELA
Monday Mindset: Come Back to Love
What if you could transform your life simply by choosing love over fear or anger? In this Monday Mindset episode, let's explore the power of a love-focused perspective. Embracing love as your guiding principle can reduce stress, enhance relationships, and bring more joy to your daily life. I’ll share personal stories showing how small acts of love and kindness can create a ripple effect, impacting those around you. Challenge yourself to let love guide your week and witness the remarkable changes it brings.
Don’t miss this inspiring episode that invites you to live a life driven by love!
Here's to another day of intentional living!
Well, hello everybody, and welcome back to another Monday Mindset episode. I am really excited about this topic of love. I've spent a lot of time over the last year and a half really kind of living my life through the lens of is this a choice from fear or is this a choice from love? Or am I seeing this experience from a place of fear or am I seeing this experience from a place of love? And every time I come back to love, I feel like I'm led in the more aligned direction to the life that I want to live, and so that's what we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 1:Is, you know, really diving into this transformative idea? Like what, if we chose to view everything and make all of our decisions and just constantly walk through our lives from a lens of love? Like what would happen? And I invite you to kind of challenge yourself this week to have this perspective of am I coming from love or am I coming from fear or anger or hurt or whatever it might be? And so I want to explore how just this mindset shift of asking yourself this question can really have a profound impact on your life. So I want you to imagine starting your week with a commitment to seeing everything. So it's Monday, hopefully, when you're listening to this. I want you to make a commitment this week to see everything, every interaction, every challenge, every moment, everything, everything through the lens of love. And if you did that, how would that lens change the way that you respond to other people? How would it influence the decisions that you make, the energy that you bring into every single day?
Speaker 1:Viewing life through the lens of love is such a powerful practice, and it's one that has the potential to not only transform your own experience, but also the experiences of those who experience you right. So people's experience of you changes when your energy shifts into one of coming from love, and so this is easiest for me to kind of practice when I'm making decisions. It's hard for me sometimes when you know I get triggered by something and immediately I want to go to that like fight or flight mode, but I'm really trying to pause, take a breath and think about what is love. How would I respond from love here? So this mindset is so powerful for you and it's such an important practice that I invite you to take on this week, because when you approach life with love, what inherently follows is you become more patient, you become more compassionate, you're more likely to give people the benefit of the doubt, you're more likely to respond with kindness instead of frustration, you're more likely to seek understanding rather than conflict, and this shift in how you relate to others can really lead to deeper, more meaningful connections. You know, I think about my relationship with my son, who just turned seven actually, today is his birthday and when I come to an experience with him from a place of love and understanding and compassion and patience and kindness, his experience of me changes, so his behavior inherently changes, as opposed to if I'm coming from a different place, right. And so I think it just has such a profound impact, not just on us, but people's experiences of us as well, which allows us to form, you know, stronger bonds with others, and I think about this too.
Speaker 1:I saw somebody on social media post something that was like such a gross judgment of somebody else and I thought about that. I'm like why are? Why would you post that? Or why would you share that? Why would you put that out into the world? Because that's not coming from a place of love at all, right.
Speaker 1:And I just think about, like, when we're judging other people and I've talked about this on a Monday Mindset in the past. You know, what is it that is coming up for us in that judgment? Does what we're judging them for trigger us in some way? Or is there something deeper within us that we are actually judging ourselves for, but we're projecting that onto other people? And so when I hear judgments come up and I do it myself I'm not perfect by any means and I definitely say things I'm like oh, that's interesting, why did I just say that, why did I just have that judgment on someone else? And it's like is that really coming from a place of love? And it's not. And when we judge others, it goes into this like negative thought pattern and I just don't see any value to our lives of living a life of peace, of living a life of happiness, of living a life of just like joy that, like that, doesn't have a place for. And so, instead of trying to not judge because it's hard, what if we just tried to love and tried to understand? What is it about this person that's making it so hard for me to love them or to forgive them, or to show kindness to them or patience with them and I'm not saying by any means that you have to tolerate behavior or treatment that is unacceptable, but we can still accept people for who they are, and we can have boundaries with them too, and those boundaries can be places, things that come from places of love. Right, love of self is so important too, and so I'm going to go into that in just a second.
Speaker 1:So the other thing and hopefully you're maybe picking up on this a little bit is that when we view life through this lens of love, we reduce stress and anxiety. We're so much less likely to get caught up in a negative thought pattern or negative loop or worry or resentment oh my God, resentment is so not helpful, right? Instead, when we come from love, we are more centered, we're more at peace, we're more aligned to ourselves, and that helps us navigate challenges in a clearer, calmer way, as opposed to boom immediately going into explosive mode. Right, I'm speaking from my own experience of very intense um to trigger uh, what sort of looking for like temper, and I've gotten so much better at dealing with that in a more productive way, in a way that is helpful to conflict. And there was a way that um helps you build a connection in conflict as opposed to creating a fracture in the relationship. You build a connection in conflict as opposed to creating a fracture in the relationship.
Speaker 1:And the third reason that I invite you to do this this week is that love really has a way of multiplying, like we get what we give, we get what we give. And so when we lead with love, when we come from love, it's so much more often reflected back to us. Right? The positivity that you put out into the world tends to come back to you and it creates this ripple effect, the snowball effect that you can uplift not just your own life but the lives of those that you interact with, and theirs and theirs, and theirs and theirs.
Speaker 1:And, in fact, I was getting an ice cream on Friday. Long story short, I just went and got some ice cream by myself, and it's cash only, which is wild. There are a couple of places where I live that are cash only, and the women behind me realized that it was cash only and they're like oh, we don't have any money at all. We are, we are, you know, you don't take a credit card. And I looked at them and I said, hey, I have 20 bucks. I'm like let me just give you $20. Let me just spot you. She's like, oh, let me Venmo you. I was like, forget about it. I'm like, just receive it, consider this just an act of kindness to pay forward to somebody else. And the interaction that happened as a result of that was so beautiful, it was so touching, it was a wonderful human experience moment.
Speaker 1:And if I had come from fear of like, oh, I got to hold onto this $20, you know, I got to be able to pay for my son's bouncy house which, for his birthday on Saturday, was $350. Crazy, and I could have held onto that out of fear, right, that I never going to, that I don't have enough. And instead it was like, no, what's the loving thing to do? Because it will come back to me in some capacity. Whether that is, you know, my neighbor helping me out with you know, whatever it might be tomatoes from her garden or who knows how it comes back to you, it doesn't matter. What matters is is that came from a place of love and the ripple effect that that had on other people and the people who witnessed that too, right, and so, like those moments, you can make those moments happen in your life. That's a choice that's up to you right.
Speaker 1:So how can you start to do this? Easier said than done, I feel like it always is simple, not easy. How can you start to do this? Viewing everything through the lens of love this week? So I want to give you some practical steps to really help you embrace this powerful mindset.
Speaker 1:Number one and this is going to be hard for most of us is to begin with yourself. Begin with loving you and who you are. Start each day with a moment of self-love, whether it's through positive affirmations maybe you do meditation or simply acknowledge your own worth. Nurturing self-love really sets the foundation for being able to extend it for others. Love yourself. I think it was Emerson who said trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string. Like you are worthy of your own love. Gosh, I know that's so hard to receive and it's so important. It almost makes me cry as I'm saying this out loud. You got to talk yourself up. You gotta be your own biggest cheerleader. Sometimes I tell myself those thoughts all the time how loving I am, how kind, all of the things that I wanna be right With my son, especially right now. I'm just trying to be a more nurturing mother for him. I repeat to myself. You are a soft, loving, kind woman, right so that I can be that for my son in this time that we're going through as a family. So begin with yourself.
Speaker 1:Step number two is to pause before you react. Holy cow, if we all just took a breath before we went into immediate defensive mode. And we've got to say something and we've got to be right, we've got to protect ourselves or whatever it might be, which is again so hard, easier said than done when we're faced with a challenge or a difficult interaction. I want you to take a moment to pause and ask yourself what would the loving response be? How can I respond with love? Or even if you've gone to a place of reaction that you didn't want to and you've had a moment to think about it, you can even still then sit back and replay it and say how could I have come at that from love? Or how can I still come at this from love.
Speaker 1:Number three seek understanding. Really make an effort to see things from other people's perspectives. At our batch planning live event, we had Allison Apsley come and speak to us and she said something that I have said for years, but the way in which she phrased it I just loved. She was just like there's no reality, there's only perception. And because we all have these different perspectives of life, of course no one sees the world through our eyes, through our lens, and the more that we can seek to understand and empathize with others, the more we can lead, you know, harmonious lives with other people, harmonious interactions.
Speaker 1:Again, that's not to say to tolerate things or to not set boundaries with people who don't respect you, right, but it is to say, how can I maybe understand where this is coming from? Right, there are certain relationships in my life that definitely interactions trigger me and I look at the other person and I seek to understand why are they like that? What was it that happened to them in their life that shaped their reality, their beliefs, for them to respond to this situation this way? And because I have a choice in how I want to respond and who I want to be and the type of woman that I want to be in this interaction, because I have that choice, how am I going to choose to respond to what is coming at me right now? Right Number four spread kindness me right now. Right Number four spread kindness.
Speaker 1:Look for opportunities to spread love in small ways, like the $20 that I gave those women at the ice cream store, right, whether it's a kind word or a thoughtful gesture. You know, I said to a woman at the gym this morning and she walked in I was like, oh my gosh, I love your shirt, you look beautiful, and like the smile on her face when I said that to her. Like just those little things. People need to hear that as much as it lights you up when someone compliments you or notices you or says something kind to you or does something kind for you. So too are we given the gift of giving that to other people as well. But we have to be able to receive it too. You know, when people say anything to me, any sort of compliment, whatever it might be, I always say I thank you so much I received that to acknowledge them. One for the compliment to two, also me on a conscious level, like, actually receive that compliment so that I can give to others too. Or we have to be willing to receive in order to give.
Speaker 1:And then number five is reflect on your day. You know, at the end of each day, especially this week, take a moment to really reflect on this, like, how did viewing life through the lens of love affect your experiences this week, you notice? Does it impact your mood or your interactions, or your overall sense of just well-being, of happiness, of joy gosh joy right? By consciously choosing to view everything through this lens of love, as opposed to fear or anger or whatever it might be just love you really truly can create a more positive, peaceful and connected experience for yourself, for others, and this human experience that we're all having together. And this isn't about ignoring, like challenges, or pretending that everything is perfect. Right, that's what I said you still get to have boundaries, you still get to decide what you will tolerate, and we also can accept people for who they are, which is hard too and in that moment of choosing to respond with love in the face of whatever might come your way.
Speaker 1:So really think about how different your week could be If you truly made this commitment. What would change in your relationships? How would it affect your work, your goals, your sense of purpose? The power of love is just limitless, and when you choose to see life through this lens, you open the door to just a more fulfilling existence. So, as you go about your week this week, I challenge you to view everything through this lens, notice the difference that it makes in your life, write it down Consciously, have awareness around it, reflect back on a conscious level and really, as much as this sounds like the hippie in me that lives in Northern California and was born and raised in the birthplace of hippie counterculture, I really mean this. Let love be your guide. Let love be your guide. Let love be your guide and see how it starts to transform your world, because remember that love is a choice and it is a choice that can elevate your life in the most beautiful of ways. All right, you guys. Here's to another great week of living intentionally.