It's All Too Much!

Recently, I read Peter Walsh's It's All Too Much. This short book guides readers through cleaning out the clutter in their homes. He points out that in society today, we have too much stuff cluttering our homes, our minds, and our lives. Peter then carefully explains a thought process to go through in evaluating and deciding what is valuable to your life and what is not.

In the last few weeks, I have been wondering if we should also consider a similar method in the educational world. I travel to various schools in our district and attend trainings and meetings with others from around the state as well. There are *so many* new initiatives and programs and projects being pushed out to the schools, educators, and teachers, I am wondering... is it all too much? There are only so many hours in the school day, and so many school days in the school year. At some point, we have got to be realistic about what an educator can actually accomplish, and accomplish effectively.

I really feel that we currently have a great deal of clutter in our educational system. We not only have too much, we are trying to do too much! You get to a point where you cannot do anything well when you are trying to do too much.

I would like to see a stronger effort from the '"powers that be" to work together, carefully review and evaluate these initiatives globally as they come, and really decide if it is going to be valuable (and possible!) for our schools to participate, rather than just blindly implement every new thing that comes across the pipe.

Otherwise, it seems we will end up with way too much ... of nothing!