Before coming to school today to work on bimester exams I watched the movie "Evening". It is a good movie with a great cast. Vanessa Redgrave is dying and lamenting the mistakes in her life. Meryl Streep is an old friend of hers, who passes on the wisdom that when you get to the end there is not a lot that really mattered. I'm stuffing questions on the exam to create something that will take kids about 2 hours to complete(in accordance with administrative wishes), but I can't say there is much I'm packing on these packets of paper that really matters.
This past week my girls' basketball team won their first game in the national tournament and then lost the next 2 to finish 3rd in our pool. We did not advance to the play-off round. As the players walked away from our last game (with a range of emotions from tears to cheerfully going off to chat with friends) I wondered if there had been anything that really mattered during the team's time together. One girl tried to get away from congratulating the other team's players after our final lost. Did my chat on being a good sport matter after I forced her to shake hands?
This past week I exchanged emails with an old friend and the former director of a school where I worked. He had written an article about the small things teachers and administrators do that end up (unknowingly to us at the time) making a significant impact on the lives of students and employees. He emailed me a copy. I'm trying to put some examples together, so if you happen to have any, add them as a comment to this blog.
This raises the need for a small addition to Meryle Streep's character's wisdom. At the end very little really mattered and often we aren't ever aware of the stuff that did matter.
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