Friday, January 15, 2016

Where Do I Start?

Narrowing in on a single topic to focus my Genius Hour time was a difficult task. There is so much I am passionate about and this is such a great, open-ended assignment I was overwhelmed.

I decided to focus in on something that will hopefully help me, my peers and other students. I am currently in my second semester of Teacher's College and have never felt like I have had so little time for myself. I am constantly in group meetings for assignments, making lesson plans, reading books and articles and on top of assignments we now have to worry about creating and updating the perfect teacher resume and getting our applications out to school boards. If I'm going to be 100% honest... it is very overwhelming. 

Since I am given time in school to focus on something I am passionate about, I have decided to take this time to focus on myself in hopes to help the many teacher candidates and students out there who may be feeling the same. It's easy to forget about your own well-being when we are constantly worried about meeting deadlines and submitting our best work. For teachers and teacher candidates, we often worry so much about our students that we forget about ourselves. Mental health issues are on the rise and it's important that we start to take time for ourselves.

In my eight weeks of research I hope to answer the question: How can we, as students or teacher candidates, make ourselves feel less stressed and more balanced? 

This may seem simple and straight forward for most people: exercise, meditate, etc. But as students we have very limited free time. What are some short day-to-day activities we can add into our everyday routine that will help to ease our stress, even just a little bit? I hope that my posts will encourage busy and overwhelmed students like myself to take some time for themselves each and everyday.

I began the project by a simple google search about stress-relieving activities for students and came across a great site called About Health. Though there are some suggestions that may be more timely, there are some great tips like brief breathing exercises and visualization.

This site is only a brief start to the in depth research I hope to engage in during the next eight weeks. I hope you're excited as I am about learning some tips and tricks realistic to reducing student stress.

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