An Attitude of Gratitude

This was our first week of the 2022-2023 school year, and it was incredible! We started with a whole-school assembly attended by students, staff, and many of the seniors’ parents. We introduced the Class of 23 and talked to them about the year to come and our general excitement to have them back on campus as an entire high school. From there, we went through the first days of classes, which for me primarily consisted of visiting different classrooms to say hello to students in smaller groups, welcome them back, and again share how excited we all are to be back together. Of course, there were meetings here and there, but the goal of the week was to be present.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect. We started the first day with no Wifi on our campus, and though this was quickly resolved it gave everyone a bit of a scare at the very beginning of the day. Our scheduling system had several glitches in the upload of student schedules and we (Michelle and Raquel mostly) spent the first day working through those issues. Our master schedule somehow included an overlap of high school and elementary school recesses, meaning our youngest and oldest students were left sharing spaces for 20 minutes and that’s something we’re still working on as I write this.

I’m sure we could list a few more “issues” if we tried, but the point is this…our students came back to Lincoln this week excited to be here. They celebrated being back together and in school, met one another and their teachers, and even learned a few things along the way. Yes, it wasn’t perfect, but nothing ever is and it was an absolute joy to watch our students’ excitement to be back in school.

I think there’s an important lesson/strategy to be learned here which is this: our attitude informs our reality. If we focus on the positive, we not only see the positive but also create more positivity. It’s a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. This is not to say we should ignore issues when they arise; of course we should acknowledge and address hiccups in the system. That’s how the good get better and the better get best. But instead of making problems our primary focus, or allowing them to dominate our perception, we should keep them in perspective.

So our school-wide strategy for the first week of August is this: try an attitude of gratitude. Name the things you’re thankful for, that go right, that work. We’re asking our teachers to try doing this each day and to ask their students to do the same, either before or at the end of class, even if they do so silently and keep their answers to themselves. As a community we’d like to see what difference, if any, a little positivity makes.