Educational Gratitude: A Sketchnote

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my experiences throughout teacher job action in British Columbia. At the end of that post, I promised that I would write about the moments in being an educator that I was grateful for. Now that we have fully completed the first two weeks of school in BC, I have spent some time to reflect upon the many hectic and chaotic moments of the startup, but also the ones that made me remember why I’m an educator.

Instead of listing them, I decided to make a sketchnote about my first two weeks. Here it is:

Gratitude: Why I Love Being an Educator - Victoria Olson; Made with Paper and Pencil by FiftyThree for iPad

Each of the sketches, words, and quotes on this sketchnote have held some significance for me in the past two weeks. I fully and truthfully admit: my passionate fire for education is back. While I'm still aware of the deficiencies of our system, no one is stopping me from loving my job anyways.

I think it’s important to continue to have conversations about gratitude in education. In fact, these conversations have already been happening (check out the archive from #bcedchat’s discussion on Educational Gratitude). This has stuck out to me since things have gotten so busy again: if we don’t stop to be thankful and focus on the positive, we can very quickly lose ourselves in the negatives that we all know exist.

Please comment below with some of your moments of gratitude from your job, or better yet, a link to a blog post full of those moments!