Welcome to Titan Talk with Dr. B.
This year, I wanted to try something a little different and occasionally share some thoughts about LOA, education, and the things I’ve learned—and am still learning—after more than 25 years in schools.
A quick disclaimer: this is not where you’ll find carline instructions, calendar reminders, policy updates, or anything else you need to know to get through the school week. And it is certainly not required reading. Think of it simply as a chance for me to share some thoughts about our school, our students, and the work we get to do together.
Read it when you have a few minutes—or don’t. No quiz at the end, I promise.
What Are We Choosing to Notice?
At the beginning of this school year, I shared a picture with our staff of a sunrise over Lake Oconee. It was beautiful, but it was also something many of us see all the time.
And that was really the point.
How often do we stop noticing the good things that are right in front of us?
This summer, I read The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor, and it challenged me to think differently about happiness, success, gratitude, and even the way we see the world around us. I shared some of those thoughts with our staff as we began the year, and the message seemed to resonate. So, I thought it might be a good place to begin this monthly conversation with our families, too.
One of the ideas I keep coming back to is that our minds become very good at finding what we train them to look for.
If we are constantly looking for what is wrong, we will find it. If we are looking for reasons to be frustrated, we will find those, too.
And to be clear, choosing to notice the good does not mean pretending problems don’t exist. Schools are filled with people, and people are imperfect. There will be difficult days. There will be decisions we don’t all agree with. A carline may take too long. A decision may frustrate us. An email may not get answered as quickly as we would like. A student may struggle. We will make mistakes.
Those things deserve our attention.
But they don’t deserve all of it.
Every day at Lake Oconee Academy, there are hundreds of moments that would be incredibly easy to miss.
A teacher stays a little later because a student needs help.
A student notices someone sitting alone and makes room at the table.
A coach encourages a player after a mistake instead of focusing on the mistake.
A child finally understands something that has frustrated them for weeks.
Someone holds a door. A teacher sends an encouraging message home. An older student helps a younger one. A colleague checks on another colleague who is having a difficult day.
None of those moments will make a headline. Most will never make it into a newsletter or social media post.
But those moments are a school, too.
There’s a difference between being grateful and training ourselves to notice what we have to be grateful for.
And I think that matters for our children.
What we choose to notice as adults often becomes what our children learn to notice. What we talk about on the ride home or around the dinner table helps shape the lens through which they see their school, their friends, their teachers, and eventually the world around them.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask, “What went wrong today?”
Sometimes we need to.
But maybe, alongside that question, we should also ask:
What was something good you noticed today?
Who helped you?
Who did you help?
What made you laugh?
What are you proud of?
What happened today that you don’t want to take for granted?
At our staff kickoff, I challenged our team to begin from a place of gratitude. I’m trying to do the same myself.
Not because everything at LOA is perfect. It isn’t.
But there is an incredible amount of good happening here every single day, and I don’t want to become so accustomed to it that I stop seeing it.
As we move through this school year together, that’s a challenge I’d like to extend to our entire O.N.E. Titan community:
What are we choosing to notice?
Because circumstances don’t always change.
The lens can.
Dr. B