After reading my colleagues’ blogs so far, I’ve decided not to follow suit and welcome everyone back to IFS or start setting new goals and targets. Instead, I would like ask you all a very simple question….”Did you achieve everything you wanted to in 2013?”
Here we are almost a full month into 2014, for me personally things have started off pretty much the same as last year, with the first 31 days being split between college work, family/friends, training and renovations.
The main difference, however, is a calming sense of control I feel in living a balanced lifestyle. This is my eighth year teaching and I feel confident and comfortable with the knowledge and new skills I learned, both last year and the previous 15 years leading up to gaining employment at IFS. The college tripling in size but this did not faze me one bit. My first thought was that now I have a bigger gene pool from which to select my PDHPE tournaments!!
Through research, practice, making mistakes, reflection and college workshops I can honestly say I am comfortable with the project based learning approach to teaching. This year I am ready to fully embrace the ideal to facilitate growth in all our students, I am looking forward to being dazzled by our students as we work together to improve all of their skills.
To explain my attitude to life, I use the current sporting example of Australian Tennis Champion 2014, Stan Wawrinka. He finally won a major event this year, but not out of the blue – it was the accumulation of 20 years of hard work, learning, reflecting and many failures. As an IFS teacher I feel I have been rewarded for all of my efforts during college, in university and through adulthood. What we have created at IFS and how rapidly our success has come is not an ‘overnight fluke’, we are all here for the long haul, come the highs or lows.
So ask yourself what did you achieve in 2013? Did it help your vision of where you would be in 2014? Are you still hungry for success in 2015? Finally, have you wasted the first month of this year already!!??
I’m a firm believer I helped shape the future of football-designated colleges in Australia and the world. This year I’m going to help us dominate on and off the field to keep the growth and momentum that we have, and rightly deserve!!
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