How Naming What Matters Most Can Change the Rest of Your School Year [Episode 165]

Rebecca 0:00
Now, y’all know, I love a new year, and it was hard for me last week, honestly, to hold back my new year, new you, resolutions, goals, BBTB Energy, if you haven’t been around here a while, that stands for my big black trash bag. Energy, which can be rampant in me, especially in the new year, as I’m cleaning up holiday decorations and cleaning out the fridge and all the things. But I knew last week that a lot of you were going back to school, so I wanted to make sure that that new semester, first day back tips got out to you in a timely manner, if you missed it, that was at last week episode 164 so I kept all of my New Year energy at bay. New Year New you Pep Talk energy, if you will, because I had to wait for this episode to really unleash it, because y’all know I’m obsessed with reflecting and dreaming and planning and goal setting all times of year, but especially for a new year, which is why I just love to always kick off the year with some sort of pep talk for you. And this year is no different, and today’s the day it’s gonna happen. I feel like though this year, specifically, if I’m reading the room or the classroom, if you will, correctly, I feel like the energy and general consensus of those of you I’m discoursing with is one of overwhelm. So for this year’s kind of New year, new you pep talk. I want to do what we do best here at secondary science, simplified and simplify it, I want to share just one specific New Year challenge for you, new year resolution, goal, mindset, whatever you want to call it, that I think has the power to transform how the rest of your school year goes. And it is one that can then be re, examined and reapplied come summer break, and then again come fall, as you transition back to school once again. And that is the concept of naming what matters most. This is a Kendra Adachi, lazy genius principal. I will link her stuff in the show notes. Y’all know I love her. I absolutely adore this principle, specifically of hers, because I’ve talked about it multiple times on the podcast, but shockingly, I still have more to say about it, and that is what I’m going to share today. We’re going to talk about how naming what matters most can change the rest of your school year. Let’s do it. This is secondary science simplify a podcast for secondary science teachers who want to engage their students and simplify their lives. I’m Rebecca Joyner from it’s not rocket science. As a high school science teacher turned curriculum writer, I am passionate about helping other science teachers love their jobs, serve their students and do it all in only 40 hours a week. Are you ready to rock the time you spend in your classroom and actually have a life outside of it? You are in the right place, teacher friend, let’s get to today’s episode.

Rebecca 3:19
So first, let’s address the elephant in the room. Why do I keep talking about this? And then we will cover how do you identify what matters most? And then how do you practically put that into practice, like in your real life? So first, why do I keep talking about this? It is something that I feel like consistently needs to be brought up again and again and continually asked, because what matters most to you totally changes based on every new season of life you are in. So it is something that constantly needs to be re evaluated. For me, I’ve always loved that teachers, we kind of get two fresh starts, two new years. We get the calendar New Year that we’re experiencing right now in January, and then we get another come August or September, when you go back to school and you have the new year, the New Year energy of the new school year. Okay, so those are two places that are just natural times to reevaluate this. But there are other seasons too, other life events that will cause a change in season where this question needs to be asked again. You know, when you have a baby, when your partner loses a job, when you lose your partner, maybe through a breakup or a divorce, or, heaven forbid, some sort of catastrophe or illness, maybe you get a diagnosis or a child of yours or loved one of yours, does that changes everything a life event that just totally reorients you and your priorities. These are all natural times to re evaluate what matters most. But it also doesn’t have to be like a major. Or mega life change. Either it could be something like you’re getting assigned a new prep this semester that’s going to usher in a new season for you in your work life. Maybe you coach a spring sport that’s a new season this spring will look much different than your fall did if you didn’t coach a fall sport. Maybe your personal hobbies change with the physical change of the seasons. Like, you know, you’re a gardener, so now you’re going to be doing that because spring is coming. Or, you know, maybe you like to fish. Or maybe my husband has so many hobbies, he has enough hobbies for the both of us. But we laugh because our life does kind of orient sometimes around his changing hobby. Is it hunting season, and it’s more specifically duck hunting season or deer hunting season or dove hunting season. Is it prime fishing season? He also loves a surf, so we only have a very narrow window of good waves where we live. Is it surfing season? Like your personal hobbies, like it may sound silly when you compare those examples to some of the more drastic ones I named, but it does change the rhythms of your family, especially if your hobbies impact the people that you live with, like we when it’s surfing season, we’re all going the beach as a family together a lot. You know, when it’s fishing season, we’re on the boat a lot. When it’s hunting, we’re creating space for my husband to go do that and take a kid or two or three with them to do it. Notice I don’t go, because it’s not my vibe, okay, but I sure do love being home by myself, or being home with only one or two of my children, so I can put them down to bed early, and I can get in the bath and read a new book on my Kindle, because that’s my hobby, okay, but any of these things can for not force that seems a little too strong, if it’s something drastic, it can force. But any of these things can usher in a new season, and that is why I want to start by saying, if you’re sick of me talking about this, I’m sorry, but I do think it’s such an important question to keep asking ourselves, and oftentimes we don’t have the people in our life to ask us these questions, and so I would love to be the person that kind of holds you accountable here of reevaluating this and creating a space for you while you’re listening To this on your car, on the way to work, or while you’re listening to this while you do dishes or fold laundry or organizing something in your classroom, to give you the space to really think about this again in light of whatever your current season is. Okay? So that’s why we’re constantly doing this. Now, how do you identify what matters most? Of course, you always consider your season of life, which is what we just talked about, and why we have to continually reevaluate this, because that season is changing. Other things I want you to consider. I want you to think about what brings you the most life, what energizes you the most. Another thing to think about is what is most important to you. Okay, I want you to think about this through the lens of in your job, but also just in your life in general, okay, what is most important to you? If you have a hard time identifying what’s most important to you, I’d ask you to look at four things. First, we love alliteration. The first three are time, talents and treasures. So looking at, where do you invest your time most? Where do you invest your talents most, meaning what you’re good at, and where do you invest your treasures most, like your actual money. What are you investing it the most in those three T’s, time, talents, treasures will really, really help identify what you actually value and what you find important. And then the fourth thing to kind of help you figure out what’s most important to you is to ask the people around you. I can’t remember who said it, someone famous and important. And if I was a better podcaster, I’d pause this and Google it before giving this quote. But I heard once, somewhere along the way, that you are like, most impacted or most influenced by the five people that you spend the most time with. So ask one of those people who you spend a lot of time with. Hey, what do you see in me that lights me up? What do you see in me that is hard, hardest for me? Where do I struggle? Where do you see me spending and investing my time, my talents, my treasures, you know, my energy. What do you see in that? Okay, these are great ways to identify that. Now, with regards to just looking at this through a professional lens, I have a really great tool to do this. It’s a spreadsheet that is included only in my core values, mini course. It’s a virtual professional development course. It’s the first unit and the secondary science simplified bundle PD courses. But I’m kind of obsessed with it, because it’s a really reflective, personal, internal unit where you really think through who you are, your life experiences, your life influences and how that impacts you as a teacher in the classroom, helps you figure out what you’re going to prioritize in your students and in your classroom culture, but there’s this one resource in it that really helps to walk you through specifically evaluating those things. It’s a spreadsheet. It involves color coding and drop down menus, and it’s all automated. I put in all these rules and equations it. I’m obsessed. It’s in the core values mini course, if you were just thinking through the. Questions I just threw out there, and you’re having a hard time really answering them, you might need more support here, and that’s where I would, I would check out that core values course, I’ll link it in the show notes, but I want you to also look at this again, professionally and personally, that core values course is really going to be looking at this more from a professional standpoint, and then the last, you know, unit mini course, and the bundle is the balance, and that’s where we look at life things. But you probably have a good idea of where you’re lacking balance, in, you know, in or out of the classroom. But I want to make sure I identify that this matters. To identify what matters most. It matters to do this, both professionally and personally, because if you’ve been in my corner of the internet for a while, I hope that you work to live, that you do not live to work. Okay, let me say that again. I want everyone to listen to this podcast, to work, to live, not live to work, meaning, you work in order to have a life. You work to provide the means for your life and your lifestyle and the people who depend on you, your family. You do not live to work. You do not live for this job. Your entire life, your entire identity is not you as a teacher, not at all, okay. And if you think otherwise, and you want to switch that up. We’re so happy you’re here because that we are about putting things in their proper place here, and that means putting your job as a teacher in exactly that place, your job. It’s not your life, it’s not your personhood, it’s not your identity. Okay, so we’re gonna isolate this and look at it professionally and personally. So first, now that you’ve kind of considered those things you reflect a little bit. I want you to identify what matters most for you at work this semester. Please just look at this semester. If you need to be even smaller because your semester is so transient, then maybe just look at the next quarter. And you pick one thing, only one thing. In the past, I’ve let you guys pick like two or three, and that means a lot of you end up picking four or five. And then here’s the thing, when you have more than one priority, nothing actually is a priority. Even if you pick two priorities, there are times when those are going to be at odds with each other. So there really can only be one priority, I found, especially like when I kind of made my grading pillars, which I talk a lot about in my assessments mini course, I kind of two grading pillars. One is that I don’t want to collect anything unless I can return it with good feedback within 24 hours. And two, I don’t want to collect anything if I’m going to have to bring it home to finish it. I want to collect it if I can grade it during my work time by the next class period, and sometimes those two come against each other, like I could get it back in 24 hours, but only if I bring it home. And so while both of my grading pillars matter, only one has to matter most, because there will be times where they clash and I have to make a decision. And so for me, the never bringing work home mattered most. So if I wanted to collect something and I couldn’t get it back in 24 hours without bringing it home, then I would fudge, if you will, on the return in 24 hours thing, I would get it back in two days, maybe because I needed a little bit more time. Or I would actually, personally, I’d schedule it to be on a Friday or something, so then I ended up getting a little bit of extra outside of school time. It felt like or before we had teacher work days, that kind of thing for a project, that was kind of how I strategized that. But that’s where it’s so important to have one, one, number one priority. When we have more than one and we’re not clear about which one matters the most, most, most, we waste time kind of waffling and trying to make a decision, and something I’ve learned so much in the last few years is that decision fatigue is so real, and oftentimes it’s those micro decisions that most fatigue us, because we don’t realize how much mental energy they’re requiring of us and just wasting. It’s like we’re siphoning off some of our energy subconsciously, even sometimes it’s truly not only always conscious, and you get exhausted by that, so going ahead and making the decision that this matters most is going to relieve you of that, so that when you get into these situations, there’s no decision fatigue, because you know already what matters most. For me personally, I like to pick one word, or maybe it’s like one theme to focus on at a time each year, one area of growth I want to lean into each year. I can literally go back to the last five or six years in my business and give you the word or the theme for every single year that I had professionally. And here’s the other thing I want to say too, like, yeah, there’s a lot of things I want to do professionally, and I’m sure there are for you too, but I would rather do one thing, 100% than do 10 things, 10% okay? And so for me, that’s why I always pick the one word. This year, my word for work is optimization. I. I want to be optimizing in every single thing I do. To give you past examples last year, in 2024 my rule was, or my theme was, no rules, and 2023 my word was just chemistry. That was it. I’ll talk about in a minute how I kind of put those into practice. But I want you to come up with your one thing that matters most to you professionally. Okay, pause the podcast if you need to to do that, then come back. And I want you to identify what matters most for you in your life, so we have our top priority professionally, and then I want you to have your top what matters most in your life, so that this can become your top boundary. So for me, having this time as a stay at home mom is my number one priority in life and my number one boundary in life, because that is why I started it’s not rocket science in the first place. Was first just to be able to afford to stay home 12 weeks with my first child because I had unpaid maternity leave. So that was like, the first goal is to get that time. And then that expanded to, can I stay home a full year? Oh, surprise, pregnancy. Can I stay home through this ones like, you know, newborn states. And then it came through, like, Okay, can I do this until all my kids are in kindergarten and have this time with them? And when I look at the calendar and I look at my life, I only have 2.5

Rebecca 16:24
years until my youngest starts kindergarten, and then all three of my children are in school Monday through Friday. You know, eight to 245 already. I can’t I look around my house sometimes and I’m like, I can’t believe I don’t have bottles. I don’t have sippy cups, I don’t have posses. I don’t have bibs anymore. I don’t even have a high chair. There’s not a diaper in this house. Like the time of babies and littles for me is flying by, and I cannot believe it, after so many years that it took to even start our family and grow it. So I do not want to sacrifice these next two and a half years at the altar of optimization, you know, for this business, or whatever it is that I choose for this business, so even if it means failing, even if it means not meeting my goals financially or creatively or whatever, even if it means it takes me longer than I think to finish whatever optimization I want to do, this is my hard boundary, because I Want you to pick what matters most in work, what matters most in life, and then whatever matters most in life, that is the really what matters most. Do you see where I’m going with this? Okay, so you’re gonna have your priority, but you’re gonna have this boundary too, that you’re gonna hold everything to. Let’s talk practically here. How do you put this into practice? Let me use a couple examples from my own life that might help you. One example of how I plan to put this optimization, you know, theme into this year for myself professionally, is by revamping the physical science curriculum. It is in desperate need of a revamp. I’ve talked about this a couple times the podcast, so I want to optimize it. What exists isn’t bad, and it still sells and it still serves teachers, but to me, it’s not nearly at the level of my other curricula, and I really want to get it up there, so that is where I’m focusing. My work energy this year is optimizing that curriculum and making it the best it can be. I’m not going to take on any other work responsibilities unless it supports me doing that. Now, if I want to do more than that, and it falls under the limits of optimization, like I want to optimize this podcast or the existing other resources I have, or the courses, then I’m going to hire someone to help me do that. So for example, marketing I’m terrible at. I pretty much rely on organic marketing for everything that I do and I need, if I want help, then in that area, I’m going to bring in extra help. That’s how I’m going to do this. Okay, because my boundary is that I’m not going to let my work life infringe on my stay at home mom life for the next two and a half years, because I only have two and a half years left of really having a little one at home that I’m working during their nap times I’m working during the couple mornings they go to mom’s morning out okay, that’s when I get about 10 to 12 hours of work in a week that I gotta do this optimization within those hours. If I can’t, I gotta hire help. Other examples like 2024 my theme was no rules, and so I tried some new things. And the main thing I did this past year was not doing anything just because I felt like I had to. And that really set me free from a lot of things. 2023 was chemistry, and so I only did things that helped me finish chemistry if it detracted from finishing chemistry. I didn’t do it. Chemistry ended up taking me a lot longer than I thought it was going to take. Thought I’d have it all out by August. I didn’t have it all out by December, but I held that life boundary. I decided what mattered most professionally, which was chemistry. I held my life boundary that year. It was not working at nights I wanted that was the. Chemistry was the first curriculum I’ve ever written where I was able to do it during the day, during my work time hours. I did build in more daytime hours to do it, but I didn’t want to work after bedtime, because that just exhausts me for my kids. And so I had that boundary. So that’s how your boundary impacts, you know, your decisions when you’re looking at what matters most and actually putting it into practice. So the reason I want to talk about this is because you’re gonna have a lot of decisions come up over this next semester and work. You’re gonna have to decide if you’re gonna collect something to grade. You’re gonna have to decide if you want to add this lab in. You’re gonna have to decide if you want to add in some after school tutoring hours for your AP students. You’re gonna have to decide if you want to keep writing all your lesson plans and curriculum design yourself, or if you want to hire it out, so to speak, and bring in some help from someone else, these are decisions you’re gonna have to make. And every time you’re gonna make one of those decisions, whether it’s as small as will I collect this or as large as will I continue to write all my lesson plans this year, no matter the size, I want you to ask yourself, what matters most. There’s a power in naming that. And then after you think about what matters most, also consider your boundary. Can I do this without sacrificing my life boundary that I have? So for example, if what matters most to you is you want to rewrite your AP biology curriculum, you know, this school year or this semester going into the exam. You have semester block classes. You have fresh group of students. You have the AP exam coming in. May you want to rewrite the curriculum, if that’s what matters most to you, but you have this boundary of, you’re not going to work after five every night, then you’re going to have to decide, like, I’m going to have to hold this boundary, even if it means I don’t finish rewriting this AP Bio course, you know, this semester, and I had to finish it over the summer, and I just get through as much as I can this semester. So there’s power in this, and it really simplifies your life when you can just name one lens through which you’re gonna look through and make all these decisions this year. So that’s your challenge for today. Consider your season. Name what matters most for you professionally in your work as a teacher, give it a word, or give it a theme, or think of just one thing that you want to focus on growing in this semester. Maybe you really want to focus on, you know, labs this semester, and so that’s going to be the one area you’re going to put your energy and time into during work, and you’re gonna let maybe your lecture notes not be as pretty, or your practice handouts not be as formatted, or your test not be as like perfectly, thoroughly written. Okay? Because you’re gonna focus on this one thing. So pick what matters most in work, and then name what matters most in life. So you have that boundary that you can hold to when you get to these places where you’re like, how do I prioritize what matters most at work without running myself ragged? Because that’s the thing here. Yes, we want to simplify your life as a secondary science teacher. Yes, I want you to have priorities, and I want you to excel in your job, but I don’t want you to do any of that at the cost of your personal life and your work life balance. So that’s it. That’s what I have for you. I hope this is kind of a new take on considering new year’s resolutions, New Year’s goals, and I hope it encourages you. If it does, I would love it if you love to review for the podcast, and also if you want to check out that core values mini course, or any of Kendra Adachi resources. I love the lazy genius so much. I’ll link her most recent book, her website, her podcast. You can check all that out in the show notes at, it’s not rocket science classroom.com/episode 165, and if you’ve decided what matters most to you this semester, I would love to hear from you. Shoot me a DM on Instagram at its dot not dot rocket dot science. That’s It’s not rocket science with dots in the middle of each word, I would love, love, love to hear from you. I cannot tell you that enough. I love hearing from you guys. All right, teacher friends, that wraps up today’s episode. If you’re looking for an easy way to start simplifying your life as a secondary science teacher, head to It’s not rocket science classroom.com/challenge. To grab your classroom reset challenge. And guess what? It’s totally free. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I’ll see you here next week. Until then, I’ll be rooting for you, Teacher friend!