Summer, the season of inspiration, has so much to offer the teacher recuperating from the school year. As many of us often do, I marked a long stretch of dedication to my job with a cold. It was a day in which I was still doing many things for work as I was at home “resting”, but I did manage to forge my way into another universe with a good old fashion movie, well documentary. Now was the time to #SeizeTheMoment and dive into the Netflix universe. Looking at the array of choices and recommendations the choice for this sick lady was Homecoming, the documentary about Beyoncé’s path to making music history with her performance at the 2018 CoachellaValley Music and Arts Festival. Although my sickness was not perfect in its timing, watching Beyoncé living inspired was a fabulous choice. Living inspired, Beyoncé managed to go from giving birth to twins with complications at close to 220 pounds pregnant to performing for two hours straight as a headliner at Coachella for two nights all in a hundred and twenty days. Reality check. This is definitely living inspired for Beyoncé, but what could this look like for the average teacher.
When summer finally arrives, we are inspired and have plans on how to fix our classrooms and curriculum for the upcoming year. Then we realize how tired and depleted we really are and feel burdened by all the items we ignored in our home lives throughout the year. And before we know it time passes and we feel like we have to make the most of our time to reboot our lives. The dreams we enthusiastically left the last day of school with start to dissipate and soon turn into worries and a race against time before the new school year begins. This is where we can learn something from Beyoncé. Beyoncé became the first African-American woman to headline the Coachella. Her performances were an homage to black culture in a variety of forms from featuring full marching bands from historically black colleges and universities to highlighting aspects of black Greek life, interspersed with a mixture of influences from black feminists and authors. The overlooked, the uncelebrated, the often not seen were her inspiration. Her living inspired sparked inspiration in so many.
Teachers, as we shift into summer let’s begin to think about how we are living inspired? It is time to find the inspiration that will drive you to stay connected to your summer dreams and take that next step or dare I say leap that will continue to spark throughout the school year and beyond. Just like the ladybug that placed itself on the rim of the windshield of my car in the picture of this post, I am living inspired this summer, how about you?