This morning after our Community Meeting I found myself feeling more and more grumpy.  No good reason, really.  I just wasn’t feeling particularly bright-eyed.  So I decided to remove myself from the room for bit, make some coffee, and try re-entering the environment with a fresh perspective.  

After coming back, I really took note of what was happening.  One girl was still working on long division.  She had asked to be introduced to the long division materials immediately after Community Meeting and spent the next two hours working non-stop as she challenged herself with increasingly complex problems.  A girl next to her was working on building molecules and had also been engaged for most of the morning.  On the other side of the room, an older boy was tackling sentence analysis.  Two younger boys had been trying to learn the land and water forms and once they realized they were still a bit fuzzy with the advanced land and water forms, they spent the next 45 minutes working through a land and water command map lesson until they felt confident with the material.  Two girls were taking out the timeline of life.  Someone else was fixing her work with squaring and cubing numbers on the bead chain, with a little help from a classmate who was nearby and about to focus on his penmanship as he wrote a letter to a teacher.

I sipped my coffee as I surveyed the scene.  An older girl came up and gave me a hug.  All my grumpiness faded away.  

Sometimes it just takes getting out of these wonderful children’s way.