Smart-i-nator

Ladies and Gentelmen,

There has never been a more perfect match for me than my husband Travis Barnes. No, he didn't hijack my laptop. I am truly saying this. The guy is my senior editor. I will let posts fly through the publishing process without him (like this one, because ehe will hate the piece). These unedited version will be many flaws to them, misspellings, un-conjugated, structurally unsound sentences. I am NOT a linguist. He knows the in's and outs of language and is just good at getting his point across. I am a full on Brian Regan stand-up act when I speak or write.

So I hand my latest email over to Trav to be edited. He and I watched a lot of Phineus and Ferb when the girls were younger, so I call him my smart-i-nator.

He can change my words from Brian Regan to C.S.Lewis...from 4th grade to grad school. I told him today that i was quitting. He makes me feel so dumb so often when he edits my work. He told me to shut up. That if anyone felt dumb it would be him. He said I regularly made him feel dumb. I asked him when do I, of all people, make him feel dumb. He told me when I start saying thing like i just added that to the Google classroom, and now it's flip flopped teaching and we can do about 5 more of those in then next 10 minutes. Did you check the Google Classroom for that?

So why am I spewing all of this you you here? Because we all have the things we are good at. For me, it is NOT writing. I butcher words and language. I have no idea why all two of you read every post I throw up on here. But you do. Trav tells me that while I am right, I do have the vocabulary of an uneducated sailor, that the ideas are what keep people coming back. 

I am a teacher and it is so easy for me to forget. We have artists, athletes, craftsmen and women, we have all kinds that make up our classroom, or offices, our teams. We need to remember we all have strengths and weaknesses. A favorite quote of mine, attributed most often to Einstein is, 

 “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” The question I have for you at this point of our journey together is, “What is your genius?”

I do not mean this to turn into a cliche post, but how many times do we in our classrooms ask students to do the same stuff or turn out the same work? Something to be mindful of with what little time we have left with them this year. I am not smart in the same why Trav is smart, but that doesn't mean I should quit putting out these excellent pieces of literary genius.