Thanksgiving is without a doubt my favorite holiday of the year. I love the food, the time spent with family, the endless televised sporting events, and the food. Did I mention the food?
Over a decade ago I was spending the day with my parents, just the three of us, and my mom went to all the trouble of cooking the entire tradition Thanksgiving meal. She spent about 8 hours (possibly more) creating a meal that we ate in about 20 minutes. Then we cleaned it all up. The meal was amazing as always, but it seemed like so much work for just three people.
The next year I was watching the Food Network and there was a show about famous foods from around the United States, and how you could get them delivered through the mail. One of the featured foods was Lou Malnati’s deep dish Chicago style pizza. Since both of my parents grew up in Illinois, I have a healthy love of Chicago style deep dish and get it any time I am in Chicago visiting my brother. I hadn’t had it in quite a while, and immediately wanted to go to the website and order it.
Before I ordered, however, I had a thought. What if we ordered pizza from Chicago for Thanksgiving instead? Nobody would need to spend countless hours making food that gets demolished in the blink of an eye, and everyone gets to eat something special that they love.
I floated the idea to my mom, and she agreed to try it out. I assured her that I didn’t really care about the huge meal, and that all I really wanted was to spend time with my parents. So now our family tradition is baking a couple of deep dish pies in the oven, whipping up a batch of my mom’s famous broccoli salad, and munching away in front of the TV while the Bears lose.
I like that we started this new tradition and have kept it going for over a decade. Nobody is stressed out, everyone has more time to be together, and the clean-up is a breeze. It’s simple, fun, and keeps what is important at the forefront.
The main reason I love Thanksgiving is that it is a holiday in which you are meant to spend time being grateful for what you currently have in your life. It’s basically the anti-capitalism holiday, as the whole purpose is to just be with your family (biological, found, or otherwise) and be grateful for what you have. The day is essentially a “don’t go buy anything today, except maybe mayonnaise for sandwiches tomorrow” kind of day. Of course, this is immediately ironically destroyed by the “buy everything you can possibly see” Black Friday sales the next day, but that is a topic for another day.
So with the focus of being thankful, instead of being a ravenous consumer, I wanted to make a list of things I am thankful for, with a bit of a teaching slant. So here is my list of Thanksgiving Thankfulness Teacher Thoughts:
1: I am thankful for my wonderful colleagues that I get to work with every single day. Every teacher I know is passionate about the job, gives their best effort every single day, and is always willing to help me out when I need it. I am so lucky to teach at my school.
2: I am grateful for the student who misses multiple days of school and comes back to class knowing what happened when they were gone because they read the weekly agenda online. Instead of “What did we do while I was gone?”, they say “I saw that I missed two lessons and I grabbed the worksheets from the absent work folders”.
3: Thank you to every single student who uses the class materials properly and returns them to the correct storage location. You are the true heroes of the classroom.
4: I am thankful that my principal has supported me with implementing Building Thinking Classrooms in my own classroom, both with financial support and with students and parents. From the moment I presented him with the book and my ideas for change he has supported me.
5: I am thankful for the existence of the Frixion Erasable pen. I just love it so much.
6: I am grateful for my Friday afternoon debrief sessions with my teaching partner Mrs. Balbas. Pretty much every single Friday we are able to talk about how the week went, safely vent our frustrations, and go into the weekend knowing what went well, what needs to be done next week, and how we are going to accomplish it. Having a colleague you truly trust is such a blessing.
7: I am beyond grateful for my cat Puck. No matter how challenging or exhausting my day has been, he is there to greet me at the garage door, run over to the kitchen, jump on the counter, and let me hug him for a solid minute while purring into my right ear. He always gives me snuggles when I need them, and keeps me on my toes in the morning if I don’t feed him fast enough. He is the best boy ever.
Well, enough of making lists for today. I must prepare to eat 2,000 calories worth of Chicago deep dish pizza!
EZMath Blog 