5d • General discussion
Welcome to March
Madness? Sure. Magical? That’s up to you.
The energy of March is always exciting and chaotic. The spring equinox occurs midway through the month, marking the transition from the stillness of winter to the blossoming of spring. The weather is still unpredictable; I’ve experienced snow days and shorts weather in the exact same calendar year. Students and teachers often follow suit, with behaviors emerging from hibernation just like those of our fellow woodland creatures. Personally, March has brought me its own craziness, with a middle school suspension and a near-firing after I got a bit too brave with a board member. Whoops.
All that said, March Madness is appropriate alliteration and should not be tied to just college basketball. However, Magical March is just as real- if we choose to see it.
Every March, I would read "Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are" by Dr. Seuss. It was a perfect blend of celebrating Dr. Seuss’s birthday and St. Patrick’s Day. If you’re unfamiliar, the book goes through a list of people who live very unfortunate lives. Characters include Mr. Potter, the T-crosse, I-dotter, who has to cross t’s and dot i’s as his main source of work, and the Bee-Watcher-Watcher who watched the Bee-Watcher. Each character and storyline is sillier than the one before, and the kids giggle the entire time. Their favorite line was always:
“Be grateful you’re not in the forest of France
Where the average young person just hasn’t a chance
To escape from the perilous pant-eating plants
But your pants are safe, you’re a fortunate guy
You ought to be shouting how lucky am I”
Something about third graders and making sure their pants were safe delighted and intrigued them– needless to say, we read the book several times.
And, in true Kell fashion, I would bring it back to gratitude- though perhaps sneakily rebranded. We would write our own version of the story to explain how we knew how lucky we were. Not only were my students grateful that their pants were safe, but they also began to see their lives as lucky rather than ordinary.
And that’s the shift.
March doesn’t actually get less chaotic. The magic is in deciding that the chaos counts as something good.
For the teachers and the mamas and humans in the thick of it—it’s a quiet reminder: even here, even now, we are SO lucky…if we’re just willing to see it.
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Welcome to March
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